"Here. I'm casting my bread upon the waters."
"What?"
Chris looked up from the stack of books he had been scanning. Chris had glanced at the spines of Eric's books countless times already, but seeing them vertically, set up in precarious stacks on the bed frame, made them seem different. Perhaps they had just been shuffled, was all.
Eric had turned away from the box that he had been carefully filling with CDs, and was holding a CD out towards Chris. Eric's face held its usual composure, betraying extremely little information. Eric stood well over six feet tall. His black hair was straight and slightly long, and made his dark brown eyes look almost equally black. His hair had a tendency to stick out to one side or another, almost as if it were trying to make up for his face's lack of expressiveness. Chris was often reminded of Nicholas Cage's hair in "Raising Arizona".
"Here," Eric repeated. Chris took the CD and looked at the cover. "Peter Maxwell Davies: Eight Songs for a Mad King".
Chris frowned. "Are you giving this to me?"
Eric stuffed his hands into the pockets of his jeans. Eric had a tendency to wear black jeans and dark-colored shirts, making his skin seem paler than it really was. "I bought it because it sounded like it would be cool. It turned out to be awful. The worst kind of avant-garde classical music. You know? Annoying, but not just annoying. Annoying in all the stereotypical ways."
"Oh yeah?" Chris turned the CD over and scanned the back notes.
"Yeah, lots of unnecessary screaming — the vocalist sounds like he smoked a case of Lucky Strikes half the time. Just, you know."
"Yeah, I think I know what you mean."
"Melodramatic. Melodramatic in a way just calculated to really get under your nerves as frequently as possible."
"Right, right."
"I'm embarrassed to even have the CD in my collection." Eric's eyes wandered briefly back to the CDs piled up in closely spaced stacks on his desk, and then to the CDs sitting in the cardboard box. "It's like the guy tried to write everyone's stereotype of obnoxious twentieth-century classical music. Like you know how people are always attributing the stupidest shit to John Cage? Like, 'oh I heard John Cage once performed a piece of music that was nothing but amplifiers feeding back' — right? They heard that someone did this, but it's someone they never heard of before, so when they retell it the only name they can think of is John Cage?"
"Eric," Chris said heavily. "Are you giving this to me?"
Eric frowned at the interruption. "Well no, not really. I mean yes, I am giving it to you right now, technically speaking. But I'm casting my bread upon the waters."
"So you said."
"The thing is, I can't even stand to keep the CD. I just know I'm never going to listen to it again. But I don't want to sell it."
"You don't want to sell it?"
"The stores never really want my CDs. Not this stuff anyway. They offer like a dollar. Or they just reject them outright. Total waste of time."
Chris blinked. "So you're giving this CD of really bad music to me as a gift."
"No, I'm offering it in trade. Trade this CD for some CD you have that you don't want."
"Gee thanks. I don't think I'm particularly enthusiastic about such a trade, not after listening to you go on about how awful this CD is."
Eric gestured vaguely at Chris and the CD. "No I don't mean you as in you personally. Just someone. Just take the CD and find someone who wants it." He waved at the CD, as if shooing it away from him. "When you do, they can have it in trade for some CD they don't want." He mimed washing his hands, a la Pontius Pilate. "If you never find someone who wants it, well then, so be it. That's fine. In fact, I guess that's probably the most likely outcome."
Chris looked skeptically at Eric, but decided not to protest. Eric, Chris knew, had a bit of an ambivalent relationship with material possessions in general. On the surface he appeared to be a packrat, yet at the same time he was acutely aware of the responsibility that every object demanded from him. He looked upon ownership of nearly everything more as stewardship. A stereo rescued from a dumpster could go from his prized possession (having all the more cachet for its unlikely origin) to a lodestone that he would desperately wish to be free of in the space of a week.
And, in any case, Chris had to admit that he liked Eric's idea, at least in principle. He wasn't sure he liked the idea of approaching everyone he knew in order to find a taker for this unlikely CD, but the idea had a certain appeal nonetheless. Chris unshouldered his backpack, unzipped one of the front pockets and dropped the CD in. "Okay, Eric. Consider your bread to be cast."
"All right." Eric turned back to his CD collection and resumed the transfer of CDs to the open cardboard box, sitting atop another, identical cardboard box. Chris watched him pack for a moment, not sure if social obligation required him to make interesting chitchat or to leave him in silence. He decided to split the difference by remaining silent for a short while. He looked around the compact bedroom. It looked as if Eric had almost finished moving out, even though Chris knew full well that Eric was only half done. The bed frame and the desk were still present, but Eric was leaving those behind. The bureau was gone. The closet was open and empty. And the white walls were completely bare, barring the thin veneer of dirt that framed the rectangles of cleanliness. Eric had packed up all of his posters and pictures the day before. What remained to be moved were the shelves, and the stereo. And the books and CDs, of course. Which was probably the bulk of Eric's possessions, at least by weight. Eric wanted to move all of those things together. Which made some sense, Chris thought. Not much use in having your stereo in one place and all your CDs in another.
Chris fidgeted a bit, and then spoke up. "So tell me, Eric."
"Yes?" Eric didn't turn away from his task, but his voice suggested that he welcomed a distraction.
"I presume you keep your CDs organized by composer."
"Alphabetized by composer, yes. Naturally."
"How do you handle CDs with pieces by multiple composers?"
"'Pieces'. I hate that word, 'pieces'. It sounds so stupid, really. 'Piece'. Piece of what? Piece of shit?"
"Well, excuse me."
"No offense meant; everyone says it. But it sounds so stupid. And pretentious, in a clueless kind of way. You know what I mean? Clueless pretentiousness?" Eric turned around to look at Chris for confirmation.
"Yes, sort of. So what? instead of pieces, do you say 'songs'??"
Eric snorted and turned back to his packing. "'Works'. I say 'works'."
"Okay. I can buy that. So ... I forgot what I was trying to ask you."
Eric shifted the CDs around in the box. "Multiple composers."
"Right. How do you organize CDs with 'works' by multiple composers?"
"They're called anthologies, you know."
"Anthologies sounds like a book of short stories."
"Well, even so."
"Anthologies then."
"Well, that depends." Eric looked over at the now-empty shelves and pointed out various areas on them, as if the CDs were still there instead of sitting in piles on his desk. "I have a separate section for anthologies, and I keep them organized by title. Most CDs that have a bunch of works all by different composers will have a title of some kind. Not all, though. Some will just mention the main performer or orchestra or whatever, followed by 'plays music by yada yada yada'."
"I see. And how do you organize those?"
"I organize those as if that was an actual title."
Chris smiled. It never ceased to amuse him how Eric could continue talking about the most minor subject in endless detail. About half of his conversations with Eric wound up just talking about this sort of detail at length, while Chris did his best to not be seen grinning. For some reason that Chris couldn't quite understand, he found that he was never bored from listening to Eric being boring. "So, you basically organize all of your anthologies by title."
"Well, no. I was getting to the next part. If I purchased the anthology entirely for one piece, and even after listening to the rest of the CD, I still don't really care about the rest of the pieces, then I will put that CD with the composer's other CDs."
"As if that piece were the only piece on the CD."
Eric considered this, staring out the room's window for a moment without turning around. "Yes, very much so. As far I'm concerned, the other composers are there to fill out the CD to its requisite length. Nobody's going to buy a CD that's only twenty minutes long, after all. Not for full price, anyway. So you record a bunch of random shit, give some total unknowns some exposure they probably don't deserve, and your CD is standard length, and therefore it stands a chance of actually being purchased by someone."
"Interesting." And it was, to Chris, at least for the moment.
"You know what? I actually have one CD in my collection that isn't standard length. Here —" Eric's fingers walked along the spines of the jewel cases in the cardboard box, but then stopped. "Oh, it's in the other box, the one that's already taped it up. Well anyway, it's a piece called 'Lento', by Howard Skempton."
"Never heard of him." This was Chris's most common response to composers' names that Eric mentioned.
"I never heard of him either, before I bought this CD." Eric turned away from his packing and fixed Chris with a focused stare. "I bought it solely because it was a CD that contained only a single piece of music, and that piece of music is less than 20 minutes long. On the strength of that alone I bought it. I was just so happy that someone was willing to buck the market pressure to fill out the CD with another half hour of crap. They said, 'This work is interesting, and it doesn't need to come with anything else so that you will pay full price when you don't care about half of this music.'"
"Huh. Do you like it?"
"Oh, it's okay. It's minimalist, so. You know."
"Not really."
"Oh, you know. Most minimalism is homogenized crap."
"Ninety percent of everything is crap. Sturgeon's law."
"Who's law?"
"Theodore Sturgeon, the science-fiction writer?"
"Sounds vaguely familiar, I guess."
"Sturgeon's law originally said, 'Ninety percent of science fiction is crap.' He later generalized it to 'Ninety percent of science fiction, or anything else, is crap.'"
"Well, I dunno if I agree with that completely."
"Well, I think of it as an expression of the usefulness of genres. The more clearly something seems to be a member of a genre, the more likely it's crap."
"Yes! Exactly. That's exactly why so much of minimalism is so bad. Because the composer is trying to hard to write minimalism. 'Oh look that Philip Glass moron is making piiles of money. I just need to write music that sounds like his shit and I can be rich too.'"
"So this piece is like that? 'Lento' or whatever?"
"Work. No, it's not; that's what I was going to say. It's still your basic minimalist work, but you know, its heart is in the right place. In an alternate universe, where the composer never was exposed to minimalism, the interesting ideas in 'Lento' would have become the foundation for an interesting piece of music."
"Hm."
"Instead of just being cycled through for twenty minutes."
"I honestly can't tell if you actually like it or not."
"Oh. It's okay. It's pretty quiet and understated, like you might guess from the name 'Lento'. It actually sounds like something from the 19th century, for the most part. Traditional harmony. The minimalist influence is really the only thing that makes it sound modern." Eric stopped and looked up at the ceiling. "You know, that's almost a perfect description of a work composed for a movie soundtrack. I wonder if this was actually written for a movie soundtrack. I would expect the movie's name to be all over the CD cover if that was the case, though."
Chris smiled. "Would you like it less if it was from a movie soundtrack?"
"Only if the movie was actively offensive." Eric closed the flaps of the box, and fished a roll of masking tape off the floor by his feet. He tore off a long strip of tape. "I actually listen to the CD more than I would in a perfect world, just because it's about the only CD I have that's only twenty minutes long."
"Really."
"Yeah. You know. 'Oh man, I gotta leave for the bus in twenty minutes. There's only one CD I own that I can listen to in its entirety in twenty minutes, so I guess I'll give "Lento" a spin.'"
"Ha. I see."
"See, this is why I wish more labels would put out short CDs."
"Yes, I see. Indeed."
"Anyway. These boxes are full. Can you take them out to my car while I start on the next ones?"
"Hang on. Before you do that, can I borrow this Skempton disc?"
"Oh, I already packed it. Remember?"
"So you're already up to the Ss?"
Eric pointed at the stacks on his desk. "No. See, the way I pulled the CDs off the shelves first made it so I wound up packing them in reverse order. So really I'm down to the Ls."
"Huh."
"How about I loan it to you after I unpack?"
"Sure, sounds good." Chris leaned over and attempted to lift both boxes at once. They were a bit awkward; still, Chris figured he could make it out to the car with them. But then he noticed that Eric was giving him a funny look. Reluctantly, he eased the lower box down and resigned himself to making two trips. Still, it sounded like he was about halfway through. Four boxes wasn't too much. In any case, moving CDs was much easier than moving books.
Eric was moving out, and Chris wasn't sure how he felt about it.
After college, Chris had managed to stay in touch with a bunch of friends who had graduated at the same time and moved to Seattle. Everyone being new to the city, they had found a house to rent together. Chris had loved how it preserved the one thing he had enjoyed about living in the dorms, namely the camaraderie and unique social energy that comes with having so many friends in easy reach. Group activities that would take days of planning under other circumstances could be organized in an hour. Chris had come to think of this as being a necessity of life. It amazed him that most people preferred to live alone, or with one other person, needing to exert special effort in order to connect with friends. Presumably other people just considered friendship to be secondary to their one romantic relationship.
As the years progressed, Chris managed to remain within a group of mutual friends, even as the members changed. The original group only lasted a year before two of the people left and two other people, newly graduated, took their places. After three years the group had split in two, Chris remaining with two others who found a smaller house. The other group eventually disintegrated.
Last year Chris and Eric had lost their third, and they had been forced to replace him with a stranger. Their social circle had changed and contracted too much since college, and most of their friends were living alone or with partners.
And now, Eric was moving out to live with his new girlfriend. His replacement was another stranger — nominally she was a friend of a friend, but Chris hardly knew her. Perhaps his long-cherished ideal of living in the same house with one's social circle had finally been worn down to tatters, and would have to be abandoned. Time to grow up and live alone, or with a girlfriend, like everyone else. Maybe Chris had just been living in a state of prolonged dorm-life all this time. He didn't think so, but then why did he feel like the only one who really cared about maintaining this way of life?
The other roommate, Juan, was an okay friend, but that's all he was. He wasn't someone with a extensive shared history that included long nights of discussing music or philosophy, or four A.M. runs to the grocery store for coffee and snacks, or helping to support each other financially during times of unemployment. Juan was a barista at a local espresso stand, and for someone whose job involved dealing with literally hundreds of different people each day, Juan seemed to have precious little to say. Chris thought that if he had such a job, he would be full of stories about the customers every day. He would probably hate the boring and repetitive work, but that wouldn't stop him from enjoying watching a cross section of humanity parade past him each day. Juan had very little to say about his job, and when he did it was as likely to be about the coffee beans as the people. He seemed to be one of those people who was more interested in performing tasks than in interacting with people, no matter how many times he did it.
Maybe Emma would be a good roommate. It seemed a pretty heavy expectation, though — being the locus of Chris's social circle — for someone he barely knew. Even if she turned out to be a fascinating person, she still wouldn't function the same as a gathering of old friends.
Well, he would just have to make more of an effort to stay in touch with his friends. That was what made living together so great: staying in touch was effortless. But now that it wouldn't be effortless, that didn't mean that it wasn't worth doing. Chris supposed he would now have to start developing habits of going out of his way to make contact — habits probably the rest of the world learned straight out of college, habits that he in his idealistic haze had convinced himself he would never need. That's what you get for trying to fight society, Chris. You think you're marching to your own beat, but all you're doing is putting off the day that you have to learn to march in step.
At least Emma had a technical job. She did tech support — she was a phone drone. Since Juan didn't really care about computers, there really wasn't much to say to him that he cared about. Not that Chris blamed him — he himself didn't really care about coffee. But if Chris couldn't talk tech, that cut out a huge part of his conscious life. And since Chris didn't deal with people too much in his job, and Juan didn't seem to care about the people on his job, what was left to talk about? Sports and the weather? Chris didn't really care about sports, not enough to talk about them at any length.
Hopefully Emma didn't hate her job so much that she would forbid any kind of computer chitchat in her free time. Chris had friends who had been "tech buddies" — friends for whom a love of computers was the foundation of their mutual regard — who had later drifted apart when they got sick of their jobs and couldn't stand to talk about computers in their free time. Chris went through phases where his free time activities involved very little that was computer related, of course — everyone does — but he secretly suspected that when you reached the point where you had to ban all computer activities outside of the job was a magic point of no return, and then it was only a matter of time before you were forced to leave the entire industry and go back to school to learn how to be a massage therapist or a landscape designer or some other bullshit job that seemed to attract tech burnout cases.
The Tourmaline was the name of a coffeeshop within easy walking distance of the house. Their coffee was pretty good — there was better if you were willing to walk farther, but it was good enough for Chris to settle on the Tourmaline. But their ambience was what Chris really enjoyed about the place. The building had a high ceiling, and the front was almost completely composed of windows. The airy and brightly lit spaciousness created an atmosphere that made Chris feel that he was privileged just to be permitted to be present. Best of all was a lazy afternoon during a light drizzle, or immediately afterwards when the quality of the sunlight burning through the rainclouds would take on a fragile crispness. Just sitting in such a place, Chris privately felt, was a kind of luxury that only comes to those who are living a charmed life. Which made it the perfect place to relax and pass the time in some enjoyable but ultimately useless fashion. Like reading a cheap science fiction novel.
Or, doing a crossword puzzle. For the last year or so, Chris had been spending more and more of his Sunday afternoons sitting in the Tourmaline, sipping lattes or macchiatos, and doing the Sunday crossword puzzles. The combination of all of these elements into one day had come to feel almost decadent, and sometimes while sitting there he could almost believe that he was an upper-class English gentleman of the nineteenth century, and doing the Sunday crossword puzzle was the closest he would ever come to breaking a sweat all week long.
Not that Chris actually wanted to live such a life. But having such a reliable source for such sensations made Chris feel as if he were getting the best of both worlds. As a result, he was now coming to the Tourmaline almost every Sunday afternoon without fail. The staff all knew him by name and by his drinks, and on slow days they would stop by and see how he was progressing on the crossword.
This Sunday was no exception, and Chris was at his usual table when a shadow fell across the page.
"Hey, Chris."
Chris looked up from the newspaper. Eric was standing by his table with an unfamiliar friend at his side. Both of them were carrying coffees in cardboard to-go cups.
"Eric. Hi there."
"Hey, this is Todd."
Todd was standing a little too far back to shake hands comfortably, so Chris just gave him a friendly wave. "Hey, Todd." Chris thought he recognized the name — someone Chris worked with, he thought. Todd was short, and had bright green eyes separated by a long, straight nose. His face was surrounded by dark curly hair.
Eric briefly raised his cup. "So Chris, we were just on our way out, because the place is so crowded, but since you're here, do you mind if we join you at your table?"
Chris hesitated for a brief moment. He had been deep in his crossword puzzle, and he was pretty sure that the upper right corner was about to "break". He hated to put it aside. But you couldn't politely tell someone that you found a crossword puzzle more interesting than them. If Eric had been alone, he would have happily invited him to sit down, and Chris would have continued to work on the puzzle while Eric chatted with him. Maybe Chris would have asked Eric for help on a couple of clues. With an unfamiliar friend of a friend added into the mix, however, continuing to work on a crossword puzzle would seem rude. "Not at all. No problem." Chris folded the paper and placed it underneath his coffee. The table was a small one, but there was enough room for the three of them to crowd around it.
Chris smiled at them as they got their elbows and coffee cups situated around the table. "So, what's up with you folks?"
Eric sipped at his drink. "We were just comparing notes on favorite music. Turns out Todd is something of a Captain Beefheart fan, and I was just trying to tell him that he ought to check out John Cage."
Todd shook his head. "Man, how you get from Captain Beefheart to John Cage — that's a bit of a leap. They're not really in the same genre."
"That's because John Cage invented his genre from scratch."
Todd interrupted, "And nobody else wanted it after he was done."
Eric plowed on regardless. "Almost everything interesting in twentieth century music goes back to John Cage, one way or another."
"John Cage is way overrated, if you ask me."
"Typical response of someone who doesn't understand John Cage."
"Oh, could you possibly be more obnoxious? I don't think that that response was really the most obnoxious response that was humanly possible, quite."
Chris leaned forward. "How much John Cage have you listened to?"
"Oh, you know —"
Eric pointed an accusing finger at Todd. "Ha! I knew it. You claim to understand him when you haven't even listened to his music."
Todd waved him off. "I've heard his music."
"What? What have you heard?"
"I heard part of this piece for piano ..."
"One piano piece? Part of one piano piece? Which one?"
"I forget the name."
"Uh huh. I'm failing to be impressed here."
Chris offered a title. "'Music of Changes'?"
"I don't think I would remember the title even if I heard it."
Eric waved a hand in dismissal. "Okay, well, whatever it was, you didn't like it."
"It was totally random."
"Ergo, Cage is bullshit."
"No, man. You're not listening. It was. Totally. Random."
"I heard you the first time."
"Literally."
"I know."
"Like he wrote it by rolling a pair of dice half a million times."
"I'm already familiar with Cage's post-1950 preference for aleatoric composition techniques, thank you very much."
Todd scowled. "What's 'aleatoric' mean?"
"But come on. You didn't even listen to the whole thing; how can you presume to judge?"
"Hey, I already know what random notes on the piano sounds like. I don't need to waste my time and money to hear that."
"No, you don't. You don't know what it sounds like. That's just it."
"if I wanted to listen to random piano notes I can write a computer program to do that for me."
"That's just it. You think you know what that sounds like. When was the last time you actually listened to it, though?"
"Man, every time I walk by my neighbor with the piano in her apartment I hear that. Ha!"
Chris smiled in spite of himself.
Eric did not smile. "Very funny."
"I know what random piano notes sounds like, my friend!"
"Very funny. Look, I'm serious."
"I'm being serious! You have absolutely no idea the sort of noise that comes out of that apartment."
"Shut up and listen to what I'm trying to say here for a minute. Cage's whole idea was that any sounds can be music if you're willing to take it seriously for a minute and listen to it until you can hear the music in it. If you just say, oh I know what that sounds like and it sounds like shit, then you're not really listening. You're completely missing the boat here."
"That's a boat I'm willing to miss."
"You're not getting the point. Look. Everything has musical qualities. If you hear something that sounds like noise, but then you listen for the musical qualities in the noise, then it's no longer just noise. It's musical noise."
"But it's still noise. You admit that, right?"
"Everything is noise."
"No, I mean noise like in annoying noise."
"Everything has noisy aspects, just like everything has musical aspects."
"That's an empty statement. That's a hippie statement."
"Look, you hear a sound. If you like it, it's music. If you don't like it, it's noise. Okay? That's how we use those words."
"Sure, fine."
"Nothing is pure music, or pure noise. It's all a matter of degree."
"Look, I agree that it's not a black-and-white issue."
"Yes. Exactly."
"Fine."
"Okay then." Eric held out a hand, as if asking for spare change. "But don't you see?"
"See what?"
"Hang on. I'm trying to remember my place. We got sidetracked. Okay, yes. Everything has some musical quality. Nothing is completely non-musical. So, you see, if we hear something, and you call it noise, and I call it music ... do you see?"
"No."
"That means, I've enjoyed it, and you've been annoyed!"
Todd shook his head slightly. "So?"
"So by refusing to take the time to see and understand the musical side of the noise, you've essentially chosen to be annoyed."
Todd's face assumed a pained expression, which he pointed at Eric by way of reply.
"But see? Why would you do that? Why would anyone choose to have an annoying experience when they could experience something interesting instead?"
"That's ridiculous."
"No, it's not! Cutting yourself off from interesting experiences: that is what's ridiculous!" Eric stabbed a finger against the tabletop.
"Sorry, I'm not impressed by your argument. Okay, yes, I am vaguely impressed, but I'm not buying it."
"Why not?"
"Because. Look. I am a human being. That means that I discern things, I look at things, I have reactions to them, I pass judgement on them. That's part of what it means to be human. Hearing something and saying, 'Wow. That noise was really annoying.' — that is part of the human experience. And it's no less an important part of it than listening to the best music."
"Oh, I definitely don't agree."
"We're not meant to just sit around and accept every single sensation that comes our way as being beautiful and interesting and all equally valid as any other."
"I didn't say 'equally' valid, necessarily."
"We're selective. That's what we do."
"You should read some Buddhism, man. Open your eyes some."
"Nonsense for hippies."
"Expand your definition a little of what it means to be human."
"Bah."
Eric turned to face Chris for the first time since they sat down, and Chris could tell that Eric was looking for a polite way to exit from the impasse that the conversation had reached. Chris did his best to hide his grin and said, "So Eric, have you finished moving in?"
Eric shrugged. "I got the stereo set up, and a few other things. That's about it. I pulled out a bunch of CDs for listening to while I finish unpacking, but I don't have my shelves set up, so the CDs are just stacked up on the floor right now." Eric sipped his coffee. "And the rest of my boxes are all crammed into the room that Alicia set aside for me to use as a study. It's very primitive."
Chris's eye was suddenly caught by an approaching form. "Well, look who else is here." Eric turned around to see.
Juan walked up to the table, wearing his favorite bomber jacket over a white tee shirt. His dark hair was very short and stuck straight up. Juan had a habit of only shaving once or twice a week, and today his face showed at least a day's growth of beard.
"Hello, roommate, ex-roommate." Juan held a large hand out over the table. "Hi there. I'm Juan."
Todd executed an awkward handshake from his chair. "Todd. Hi there. I work with Eric."
Juan looked around and then back at Chris. "Mind if me and my friend join you?"
"No," said Chris. "Presuming we can all fit around this table. And we're going to need to steal some chairs from other tables. Unless your friend would prefer to stand."
Juan set down his large cup and saucer and began looking for tables with unoccupied chairs. Chris and Eric squeezed their chairs closer together, trying to make room for two more. Todd moved his seat counterclockwise, clearly not entirely sure where his chair should go to minimize squeezing up against people he had only just met.
Eric turned incrementally towards Chris and said in a quieter voice. "Sorry about invading your comfortable little table."
Chris smiled. "Don't mention it. It's been entertaining."
"How's the crossword going?"
"So-so. I've got one corner on the run."
Juan returned with a couple of chairs, closely followed by another with a cup of coffee and an uncertain look on his face, which Juan seemed not to notice. "Everybody, this is Fred." Juan sat down in one of the newly arrived chairs and patted the seat of the other one, looking up. Fred reached over to put his cup and saucer on the crowded table, then squeezed himself through the others and into his chair. Juan turned to Fred. "Fred, this is Chris, one of the guys I live with; Eric, who used to live with Chris and me but just moved out; and Todd, who works with Eric."
Fred was of average height, perhaps slightly taller than Juan. He had wavy black hair that betrayed the beginnings of a widow's peak, and an inch or two of sideburns. Dark hairs covered his thin arms. He wore a brown tee shirt with a fading "Pixies" logo. Chris noticed that Juan didn't mention how he knew Fred. Chris was just on the point of forming the question when Fred spoke up. "The woman behind the counter was acting kind of funny."
Eric chimed in, "Funny ha-ha or funny peculiar?"
"Funny peculiar," Fred said. "She kept staring at me out of the corner of her eyes."
Juan frowned. "Did you say anything stupid to her?"
"No. Jeez, what a question."
Eric turned to Juan. "Juan, do you find that Fred is in the habit of saying stupid things to baristas?" Eric obviously thought that Juan's question was a little off-centered as well. Belatedly it occurred to Chris that Fred must be Juan's newest paramour. That would explain why no litany of common background was offered during the introductions — the common background might be little more than a night at a bar.
Juan said, "Fred's never been to a coffeeshop before. This is his very first coffee ever."
Fred interjected, "That's not true. I've had coffee before. Just not espresso coffee."
Todd laughed. "Wow. And how long have you lived in Seattle?"
Fred said, "I just moved here six months ago."
"Ah," said Todd.
There was a moment of silence. Chris jumped in to get the conversation going, and asked the obvious question. "Where from?"
Juan shifted in his chair, to allow his legs to extend out away from the table. "So, did you order a latte?"
"From Winnipeg. Yeah, I got a latte. I figured it was safe. That's what you ordered, right?"
Chris asked, "All the way from Canada, huh? What's the reason you moved?"
"Did you get yours with vanilla, too?"
"Got a job here. No, I picked lime instead of vanilla."
"Lime?" Juan winced. "Why lime?"
Fred looked around the table, and saw that everyone was now looking at him. He turned to face Juan again. "Because I like lime."
"But. Jeez, Fred. You can't mix lime with milk."
"Why not?"
"It makes the milk go bad, you goof, that's why not."
Fred released a short exasperated sigh. "Then why is it there on the shelf? Just to fuck with people?"
"No, it's for people who don't drink coffee; they order Italian sodas instead. Like homemade 7-up. You don't put it coffee."
"Well, I saw the lime, and so I picked it."
"But you can't mix it with the milk."
"Well, I just wanted it to go with the coffee. I don't care about the milk."
Juan responded to this with a confused look.
Todd gently interjected. "Fred, you're from Canada. You probably know a lot of people who drink tea, right? You know how when they serve tea, they ask if you want milk or lemon in your tea? You can't have both, because the acid in the lemon juice curdles the milk."
Fred shrugged and looked vaguely offended. "Nobody I know puts junk like that in their tea. If they want tea with lemon they make lemon-flavored tea."
Juan snorted. "Okay, look, just taste it and tell me what you think."
Fred got the hint of a defiant expression on his face, and suddenly Chris suspected where this was going to go. Fred picked up his cup and slurped at the coffee. He paused, considering the flavor, and then took another, longer sip. Juan's eyes widened slightly.
Fred put down the cup. "It's fine."
Juan shook his head. "Okay, mister. Don't mind me. It's fine."
Fred turned back to Chris, "So yeah, to answer your question, Microsoft offered me a job doing software testing, so I moved to Seattle."
Juan interrupted again. "I just think your first latte should have been slightly less adventurous."
Chris decided that since Juan's interruption wasn't directed at him, he should just ignore it. "And do you like it here so far?"
"Here, Fred, taste my latte. See how you like that."
"So far Seattle's been good." Fred picked up Juan's cup and took a sip. "Uh huh. I like that, too."
"Okay. Next time, order a vanilla latte."
You want to try a sip of mine?"
"Hell no."
Chris tried again. "What project are you working on?"
Todd sat up. "Hey Fred, I'd like to try a sip."
Fred smiled, apparently vindicated in some small measure, and passed Todd his cup, saying to Chris. "I'm kind of inbetween projects right now. I've been mostly doing testing of Office, working with a couple of different groups."
Todd took a careful sip and gravely allowed it to move across his tongue before swallowing. He passed back the cup. "Yeah, it's definitely — adventurous."
Chris considered the short list of people he knew who still worked at Microsoft, but none of them were likely to bump into someone doing software testing for any of the Office projects. "So do you live over on the Eastside, then?"
Juan shook his head. "You know, the coffee here is not that bad. You should have just ordered a tall latte. You can play around with syrup after you know what the coffee itself tastes like."
"Yeah, I live with some co-workers over in Bellevue. I don't really like it over there. I want to move to Seattle eventually. But right now I got a cheap place which I share with a co-worker. He's got a car, so I ride in with him, help pay for gas. It's not a bad setup. I figure once I've saved some more money I can look for a place over here."
Chris nodded. "Yeah. I'm sure the rent's a lot cheaper over in Bellevue."
"It is, but just barely. It's not as cheap as you'd think."
"Really?"
"Yeah." Fred paused contemplatively, then sipped at his coffee.
The conversation seemed to have ground to a halt. Juan looked around the table and jumped into the breach. "So what were you all talking about before we came over?"
Eric piped up. "John Cage, actually."
Juan rolled his eyes. "I should have guessed. Hey, Fred. You ever hear of this guy named John Cage?"
Fred put his cup down upon his saucer with a clatter. The others looked up and saw Fred carefully suppress a gag reflex. His face had turned a little pale.
Without taking his eyes off of him, Juan carefully took hold of Fred's cup. "Tell you what, Fred. I'm going to just bus this latte. Here, you can have mine. I'll go stand in line and get another one for myself."
Fred looked annoyed at Juan's patronizing tone, but nonetheless allowed him to dispose of the adventurous latte.
On Monday morning Chris was in the middle of getting dressed when he detected within himself the subtle signs of a fever. Oh, great, he thought. The symptoms were slight, and for a moment he debated going into work anyway, but then it occurred to him that he was probably at the height of infectiousness right now. He sat down at his computer and wrote a perfunctory email to his boss explaining his absence.
An hour or so later Chris had changed back in his pajamas and was lying on the couch with a quilt carefully wrapped around him. The house was quiet. Chris had taken the television with him when he left, so Chris's mind was left to wander on its own.
There was a knock at the door. Chris stood up. For just a moment, he stood there, uncertain of what do next. Hobbled by the heavy quilt and the fever, his brain seemed to have forgotten how to walk. He felt like a toddler for whom walking was nothing more than a vague itch in the cerebellum, an impulse accompanied with much swaying and loss of balance. Then he stood up straighter, and something in his brain snapped back into place. His motor skills suddenly came to attention, and he walked to the door and opened it.
On the porch stood Emma, a backpack over each shoulder. Emma had thick, straight hair, mousy brown in color, that reached to just past her shoulders. Bangs hung unevenly down to her eyebrows. She wore a black leather jacket over a plaid flannel shirt.
"Hey, Chris. I'm glad you were here to get the door. I can't remember where I packed my keys. I was about to start to go digging through everything I own looking for them."
Chris looked at her, and thought: Who the hell packs their keys when they move? Why not just put them in your pocket, where you keep them normally. "Oh, well, good thing I was here," was all he said.
"How come you're not at work? Are you sick?"
"Yeah, I've, uh. Got a fever."
"Is it bad? I had been kinda planning on you helping me move my stuff in when you got back from work. I only have this truck for today."
"Maybe I could." But the thought of hauling heavy boxes made Chris shuffle back to the couch. "I'm not really sure how bad it is." He plopped back down into the indentation he was cultivating.
Emma had only walked a couple of steps into the house. She was standing there with her two backpacks, as if uncertain that it was safe to proceed. "Well, what's your temperature?"
Her tone of voice suggested to Chris that she suspected him of lying about being sick in order to avoid helping her. Or maybe that was just a bit of paranoia conjured up by the fever. Chris didn't have the energy to figure it out. "I don't know. I never check my temperature. I don't even own a thermometer."
Emma was definitely looking at him doubtfully now. Or, maybe she just thought he was stupid for not taking his temperature when he was sick. "Well." She turned and dropped her backpacks down against the wall next to the door, and unzipped a pocket in the dark green one. From this she pulled out an overnight bag, which she unzipped in turn and retrieved from within a thermometer.
Chris looked surprised. "You don't know where you packed your keys but you can go straight to your thermometer?"
Emma waved away his suggestion, thermometer swinging like a baton. "I just happened to remember where my overnight bag was. Here." She walked over and held the thermometer in front of his mouth. Her face assumed an expectant look.
A fevered-hazy part of Chris's mind was annoyed by the presumtuous way she was trying to mother him. It would have been more considerate to just hand him the thermometer and let him put it in his mouth himself, for example. There was a slightly superstitious idea that he was better off following his usual approach of never taking his temperature. Knowing the number couldn't really help him. It wouldn't make the fever go away faster. On the other hand he could imagine it making matters worse. If the number were much higher than he thought it would be, his assumption that he would be much longer in recovering from it could help make it into a self-fulfilling prophecy, as his body hunkered down and lowered its expectations for himself.
And yet that sounded a little too silly for Chris to take it entirely seriously, at least enough so that he would be willing to voice such grounds for his objection. So, proceeding on the path of least resistance, he meekly opened his mouth, tongue aloft.
Emma pushed the thermometer in, deeply but not ungently. They both stared at each other for a second or two. Emma smiled at him politely, then she zipped her overnight bag closed as she walked back to her backpacks and put it back away. Then she stood up. "What about Juan? When he gets back from work, he should be able to help me move in, I guess."
"Mm mm." Chris sounded. The thermometer began emitting tiny beeps. Chris carefully extracted a hand from under the quilt while minimizing heat loss from within, and removed the thermometer from his mouth. Oh man. It was definitely higher than he had expected. "One hundred point nine."
Emma raised her eyebrows. "Wow, that's a fever all right. When did this start?"
"I woke up with it this morning. Anyway, what I was trying to say was, Juan may not be here today. He, uh," Chris didn't want to say that he had a "boyfriend" — that sounded much too momentous for what might be nothing more than a prolonged one-night stand, for all Chris knew at this point. "He met someone this last weekend, and I think he's been hanging out with him a lot. Yesterday, he was only here for a few minutes all day. He just dropped in long enough to pick up some clothes, or supplies or something."
"Oh really?" Emma looked out through the window. Presumably at a truck parked in front of the house, borrowed for only one day. "So we might not see him at all today is what you're saying?"
Chris shrugged. "He might come back, I don't know. I don't know this guy's phone number or where he lives, unfortunately. I just met him for the first time yesterday."
"No no." Emma seemed to be resolving herself. "I wouldn't want to call him up or anything obnoxious like that. It's not like I actually asked him for help or anything. You know," and here she mimed talking into a telephone, "Hey you lazy good-for-nothing, I'm your new roommate! Get over here and help me move!" Chis smiled weakly but appreciatively. He held out the thermometer to Emma, but she just pointed at the end table next to the couch. "Hold onto it. You're going to need it later."
Chris had no desire to check his temperature again, lest he learn it was going up, but he put it down where she indicated.
Emma blew out a large breath. "Well. I guess I better get started here. Who knows how long this will take."
Chris decided that he had no desire to sit here on the couch as she walked by periodically with boxes while he did nothing to help. Even though he was starting to think that he what he really needed was a second quilt, and nothing would have convinced him to step out of the one he had wrapped around himself now, he knew that he would still feel like a jerk sitting on his ass watching her haul boxes all day long. "Okay. I'm going to go lie down now." He stood up, then realized that he sounded like he was trying to avoid her. To cover he added, "The fever's higher than I realized, so I think maybe I should get under the covers."
"Yeah, I think you should. You know what you need, is some chicken soup." Her face suddenly assumed an expression of one who is determined to be of assistance. "I'll make you some after I've got some of my stuff moved."
Chris gave her a puzzled frown. "You won't have time; you're going to be too busy."
She shrugged. "We'll see. Maybe it won't be so bad."
Chris said, conversationally, "Do you have a lot of stuff?"
Her reaction was immediate. "Oh, man, do I! I couldn't believe how much stuff I own. I never would have guessed. It took me forever just to get it all into boxes. You just would not believe."
Chris nodded. "Yeah. I hear you. Okay. I'm going now."
Emma said, "You know what I would do if I were you? I would go watch TV. The soap operas are so funny when you're feeling sick, and it really helps to pass the time. You know? Normally they're just pathetic, but there's just something about when you're all feverish, and trapped in your bed, or on the couch, and the soap operas are constantly having all this ridiculous stuff happening. I swear it's a trip."
"Hm. I'm sure you're right, but we don't have a TV, actually."
She looked amazed. "No TV?"
Chris was caught off guard by the strength of her reaction. "We just had the one TV which belonged to Eric." He shrugged. "And he took it with him when he left."
"Huh. I just assumed you would have a big old plasma screen TV like all the other geeks."
Chris considered this, not really sure how to take it. Again he decided on the path of least resistance. "Yeah. I guess don't watch much TV."
"Well, maybe after I've moved in and when you're feeling better we can all go out and buy a new one."
Chris looked at her neutrally. He had actually been looking forward to the idea of living without a TV, at least for a while. Eric's TV-watching habits were eccentric, and Chris didn't really care about other people watching TV. But he and Juan had both showed similar levels of ambivalence about the TV going away, and they had both been in favor of cancelling the cable bill. Chris certainly had no problem with Emma getting her own TV, keeping it in her bedroom, and paying for cable herself, but he could tell that that wasn't what she had in mind. He cast about for a way to drop the subject without committing himself either way. See, thought Chris, this is what comes of taking your own temperature. I'm already feeling weaker and more depleted than I really am. Emma was looking at him, apparently waiting for some kind of response or acknowledgement. "Yeah, we'll see. Talk to you later."
Chris's bedroom was in the basement. Chris had always had an affinity for basements. They were secret places, where one could retreat to and be forgotten about. The ceiling was full of pipes and crossbeams, and Chris found himself focusing on their patterns. If he stared long enough, he could cause himself to suddenly see shapes in the negative spaces, or convince his brain that a protruding slat was actually a horizontal indentation.
Chris lay on the bed, his usual sheets and comforter supplemented by the quilt that he had taken from the sofa. Chris kept a quilt on the sofa so that he could bundle up and lie back on cold days while he worked on his crossword, or read a novel. The quilt had been made by his grandmother for him, when he was a boy, and he had taken it with him as a constant companion in adulthood. Reading a good, fun novel with hot chocolate while sitting on the sofa bundled up in his grandmother's quilt was really, Chris thought, an exemplar of being comfortable. The quilt was knitted from a heavy yarn, and featured alternating red and white squares inside a blue lattice. In the middle of the quilt she had worked in a blocky picture of a soldier. A strange image, even for a boy, Chris thought, when he thought about it at all. Now he was beginning to think that the one quilt may not be enough. He could feel the chills starting to set in. He should never have let Emma make him take his temperature. He was sure he was going to have much worse symptoms now, now that he knew how bad he ought to be feeling. He gave into temptation and let himself shiver for a moment. Clearly the fever was still on the rise. By evening-time he would be raving deliriously, and it would be two weeks before he would feel completely recovered again. He should have refused the thermometer — stood his ground — maintain his belief that the fever was minimal. If he had done that, he'd have been feeling fine before the day was over.
The stereo was on, tuned to a local college station. Right now there was a classical show on — pretty unadventurous for college radio, but it was fine with Chris, who didn't have the energy to listen to anything that required focused attention in order to appreciate. The DJ spoke a little too quietly, and with lots of pauses, something one would only hear on a college station. He finally finished talking about Debussy, and let play a piano piece, "The Engulfed Cathedral." ("La cathedrale engloutie" in the original French.) Chris had had a friend in college, named Bob, who had been practicing that piece, and once he had reached the point where he could play it through without errors had developed a habit of playing it whenever there was a piano around. Chris had thought that that piece was not the most appropriate to be playing in the student union, or one of the nearby coffee shops, where the conversation and surrounding noise tended to drown out the quiet parts, and the loud parts of the music tended to intrude on people's conversations. But it was still an enjoyable bit of music, and tricky in parts to play, and Bob would occasionally get positive feedback from the bystanders. Chris had to admit that he liked the music despite Bob's incessant playing of it. Listening to it now, played very differently but still entirely familiar, Chris's mind snagged on one snippet — just a single measure. Bob had found the fingering in that measure especially difficult, and one time, in a deserted student union well after midnight, Chris had sat nearby, drinking coffee and slogging through his homework for Computer Science (the Data Structures class in particular), while Bob practiced that one measure over and over, repeating without pause, for many minutes it seemed at the time. At first Chris was annoyed by listening to a few seconds of music repeated indefinitely, but after a minute or two, he found it easy to tune out, and he found himself focusing more clearly on the techniques in the homework problems. Each repetition, at least at first, was slightly different, and there were frequent halts as Bob's fingers tripped over the moves or struck a wild dissonance. These halts were invariably accompanied by cursing, at first, but then Bob seemed to move past speech, and nothing came from over there but piano notes. After several minutes of this, Chris looked up from a problem he had just finished, and noticed that Bob's playing of the measure was much improved. One measure in three stumbled, or had a too-long wait between one note and the next, but the other two were all but seamless. But Bob continued to play the measure, apparently not satisfied yet, presumably intending to burn the muscle movements of this one measure deep into his brain, until it was completely automatic, and became the easiest instead of the hardest measure of the entire piece. Perhaps he had mesmerized himself and was powerless to escape from the playing. In any case, Chris found, as he started the next problem, that he was actually enjoying listening to this one measure repeated forever. It was really a rather pretty piece of music, much prettier than he had realized. Eventually someone walked over and asked Bob to knock it off, either play something else or just let the piano be. The guy was really rather polite about it, when you considered how long Bob had been going at it. Bob didn't say a word, just nodded his head and proceeded to play the rest of the piece from the next measure on.
Now when Chris heard that measure come up on the radio, he could almost see the problem sets he had been working on that night. The music on the radio continued forward, but Chris was remembering that the sheets of paper he had been writing on had had an odd scent to them, presumably something in the wood pulp but it reminded him of insecticide, like "Off!" bug spray, but stripped of its citrusy elements. He had decided to do his homework on paper because working on the computer had been too much of a distraction — there were too many other interesting things one could be doing when one was at a computer. And he had been suddenly taken with a romantic notion of someone working late at night with paper and pen, and not a keyboard in sight. The nearest coffeeshops were all closed, so he had chosen the student union as his next-best choice. There were 24-hour coffeeshops in the area, but they were too far away to walk to. The air was extremely cold outside, and damp, which added to his romantic feeling, but not so much that he was willing to stay out in it longer than necesary. Ideally, he would be working by candlelight in some garret, with a fire in a tiny fireplace to keep off the cold that lurked just outside his little window. While he worked on his Data Structures problem sets. It was important to his fantasy that it was his Computer Science homework that he was working on in this fashion. Writing, say, poetry would have completely spoiled the essence of the anachronistic romance of the experience for Chris. Unfortunately the student union proved to be sorely lacking in the ambience he was looking for. Every place he could find was perfectly well-lit, and the completely normal room temperature and lack of windows did not permit him to remain conscious of the cold outside. The whole thing probably would have been forgotten had not Bob came along. Either suffering from insomnia or unable to sleep for thinking about his beloved Debussy piece, Bob had sought out the only piano available at this hour. Actually, since Bob was taking music classes, he would have had a key to Smith Hall, where there were several piano practice rooms. But Bob apparently preferred to play where he stood a chance of being heard by others.
After Bob had stopped playing, he had come over to Chris's table and chatted with him for a bit. Though they didn't really speak of it, Chris could see Bob had a vague and abstracted expression, and he felt sure that they had both had had a similar experience listening to the repeated measure, feeling their attention focus down to a laser point, though each on very different subjects. Bob talked of other matters, presumably inconsequential as Chris could remember nothing of it now, and eventually left to return to his dorm. By the time he had gone, though, Chris had lost the mood, and it took him a solid two hours to slog through the remaining problems.
The notes from the radio of "The Engulfed Cathedral", or perhaps it was some other piano piece playing now, fell about his thoughts along with the notations of Data Structures. Chris suddenly realized that the piano music actually could be seen to define a precise data structure. One had only to listen closely enough to discover the mapping from one to the other. This run of notes in the left hand, slowly rising and then falling again, was a substructure. It repeated in the next measure, making a pair. The right hand meanwhile played similar yet slightly different melodies for each repetition; there was your different data. Perhaps it was a name-value pair ... no, probably not, as they were too similar. Samples from a single source of data, then, taken at slightly different times. And that sudden, loud note, was probably an error flag, or some kind of exception handler, accompanying the data structure so that errors could be properly detected, perhaps even corrected, if the programmer using the structure was able and willing to supply the necessary error-correction routines.
And so, bundled up and shivering at times, Chris passed the afternoon with his feverish thoughts — who needs a TV? — which became more far-ranging and hyperassociative until somewhere around early evening, he fell asleep.
Emma started at the sound of the front door opening. She was sitting perched upon the railing of the house's large front porch, her back to the sunrise's feeble warmth. Next to her on the railing was an empty coke can that she was using to catch the ashes from her cigarette. Next to the can was a green plastic disposable lighter and a dented cigarette pack. Her face quickly assumed a guarded yet neutral expression, and for a moment she focused her attention on the cigarette as she brought it into her mouth and inhaled. She held the breath for a moment, then exhaled lenghtily through her nose. Finally her eyes rose back up to Chris.
Chris stepped forward onto the porch, pulling the door closed behind him. He was bleary-eyed and his hair stuck out in disorderly spikes. He was dressed in the same pajamas he had worn during their previous meeting, over which were draped his comforter and quilt. He looked about the world around him, and took a deep breath. He looked back at Emma.
Emma quickly spoke, "Good morning, sleepyhead!"
"It is morning, isn't it? When I saw my clock I thought for a bit it might actually be eight P.M. I can't believe I slept through the entire day."
"Yeah. Don't you remember me knocking on your door last night?"
"What?"
"I knocked on your door because it was dinnertime. You shouldn't completely starve yourself when you're sick, you know. Even if the idea of food makes you nauseated like, you should still eat a little something."
"So you tried to wake me up?"
"I did wake you up."
"You did?"
"I thought I did. First I knocked, then I knocked some more, then I knocked louder and said 'Hey Chris! You want some chicken soup?' And you said back, 'No, I'm fine.'"
"I don't remember that."
"I said, 'You really should eat something.' And you said, 'I'm really not hungry. I'm just gonna sleep now.' You said it like you were kind of mad, so I wasn't gonna bug you again."
"I must have gone straight back to sleep."
"You must be starving by now."
Chris shook his head. "Not really."
"How do you feel?"
"Quite a bit better." Chris didn't have to think to answer that question. When he had woken up he had been surprised at how much the fever had receded. A lot of his strength had improved as well. He didn't quite feel up to leaving the house, but he almost certainly would by tomorrow. It was also surprising to him that he didn't feel any hungrier, given that he must not have eaten since yesterday's bowl of cereal.
"Good! That's great news."
"Yeah, thanks." His thoughts were a little clearer now, too, although somewhat muddled still from his long sleep. He looked obliquely at the sunrise. He shouldn't be outside, even given his improved condition. The air was cold, as was the porch beneath his unshod feet. Why had he even ventured out here? Oh, right. Emma was smoking. He had been shocked when he saw her through the window. Had she lied about not being a smoker when they had shown her the place? Surely they hadn't forgotten to explicitly state that they were only interested in non-smokers. Had they? Chris couldn't remember specifically mentioning it, but surely they must have done so. One of them would have remembered, wouldn't they? She couldn't have smelled of cigarette smoke when she came over; Chris felt sure he would have noticed that. Or one of the others would have. And then they would have said, non-smokers only, sorry. But then doesn't that mean that she must have like gone out of her way to get the smell off of herself and her clothes before coming over? Chris closed his eyes as he tried to think clearly. It did seem that odds were that she must have been at least a little bit deceptive. And now that she was safely moved in, she was making no effort to hide it apparently. Chris opened his eyes again. She was looking away, off at the empty street where nothing was happening — probably not sure why he had closed his eyes and diplomatically giving him space.
Eventually she turned her attention back to the porch, tipped ashes into the coke can, and made eye contact with him again. Smiled. Chris smiled wanly back, and tried to maintain a casual expression as he looked directly at the glowing end of her cigarette. "So you smoke?" Chris hadn't intended it to come out as a question, but there it was.
"I'm quitting. This is actually my last cigarette."
"Aha." Chris wasn't entirely reassured by this, but he allowed his face to assume an expression of reassurance.
"Yeah. I had actually planned to have my last smoke just before I moved, but I still had a bunch of cigarettes left, and I couldn't just throw them away, you know? My body was expecting twenty cigarettes from my last pack. If I had just tossed them it would have driven me nuts."
Chris nodded.
"You probably don't even know what I mean. You've never smoked, have you?"
"No."
"Yeah. Trust me on this one. Your body gets weird if it knows that you have cigarettes but you don't smoke them."
"Mmm."
"Everybody smokes where I live, or used to live, so I could see that there was no way I was going to be able to quit while I was still living there. It's totally impossible to quit when your friends are smoking around you all the time. You'd think that once your sense of smell comes back all that smoke would just gross you out, but it doesn't work that way. That's my main reason for moving, actually, was so I could quit."
"Wow."
"Yeah, I just know that I'm just not going to be able to hang around my smoking friends as much as I'd like to, at least for a while. Maybe when I'm stronger it won't be so bad, and I can handle it, but when you're with friends, having a good time, and they're all having a good time, and they're having a good time smoking, it's just the most natural thing in the world to bum a cigarette and light up. You know, 'just one'. Next thing you know you're feeling guilty about always bumming cigarettes from your friends so you buy a pack. And you're smoking again."
"Uh huh."
"Yeah, I tried to quit a couple of times before. You can tell, can't you? First time, I lasted less than a week. Thought I'd have just one, you know, like a smoke break, ha ha. Started smoking again the next day. Didn't feel like I had to take it seriously since I had already made one exception. Second time, I made a big deal out of it and I lasted for over six months. I was totally clean. I thought I was home free. I was so sure, I figured I could smoke on certain occasions, you know, be a social smoker, so I didn't have to be the non-smoker in the corner all the time. So stupid. You just start finding more and more special occasions, until you realize you're smoking as much as you ever were.
"Too bad." Chris tried to sound sympathetic, but he was having a hard time feeling too interested in this dissection of the inner workings of the rationalizations involved in nicotine addiction. He had never been even slightly tempted to try smoking, after the one time he had inhaled a puff from someone else's cigarette, and he had had very few friends who were smokers, and none of them were close friends. He was starting to feel the cold. He started rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet to see if that would help warm him up a little.
"Yeah, so those two times left me really demoralized. I figured I was never going to be able to quit, so I should just stop trying. It's been years since then. I figured if I was going to try to quit again, I really had to take it seriously, because if I failed again, it would just be too much. So this one is going to be for real. Or else, you know?"
"Oh yeah. Or else, lung cancer, right?" Chris immediately regretted being so blunt.
"Yeah. Exactly." Emma didn't seem to have minded. She appeared to be in good spirits, in fact. She had started smiling as she had gotten wound up, conversationally speaking, and she seemed now to be suffused with the glow of purpose, keenly aware of preparing to take the first step in a noble quest.
Chris decided not to pursue any discussion of possible deception on her part. If she lived in a house full of smokers, then she certainly must have sterilized herself thoroughly before meeting with them. But she did seem very serious about quitting, if she was prepared to lose contact with her friends, and Chris didn't want to upset whatever careful balance had permitted her psyche to take this step. He definitely didn't want to do anything that might contribute to her falling off the wagon while she was living here.
"So, this is your very last cigarette." And it was almost gone, Chris noticed.
"Yep!"
"Well, hope you're not enjoying it."
Her smile vanished at once. "Excuse me?"
"Well, you know. If you were enjoying it, then it would be harder to not start smoking again, right?"
Emma looked at him for a moment, then she put on a smile, much more restrained than before, suggesting that her crash course in the psychology of a smoker had utterly failed to teach him anything. "Oh yeah. Right."
They did not speak again for several seconds. Chris watched as the white part of the cigarette got smaller. Emma seemed completely focused on committing the experience of these last lungfuls to memory. Finally there was nothing left but filter, as far as Chris could see. Still she inhaled again, holding the smoke for a moment before exhaling through her nostrils. Looking at the cigarette critically, she appeared to finally concede that nothing worthwhile was left. Raising her left foot, she crushed the cigarette savagely against the sole of her shoe, twisting left and right. "Shit!" she suddenly whispered, yanking her hand away automatically. The crumpled filter fell to the porch floor. She carefully picked it up and dropped it into the coke can.
Chris nodded. "Congratulations." That was stupid. Congratulations, you managed to get the butt inside the can, it sounded like. Wishing her good luck would have been more appropriate.
Emma didn't appear to mind. "Thanks. I am now an ex-smoker."
Chris said a silent prayer that she would stay that way, and turned to go back into the house. When he turned back to see if she was following, he saw that she was now trying to put the lighter through the opening in the coke can. It wouldn't fit, and after trying it at different angles and rotations she gave up. She smiled apologetically. "Trying to symbolically throw away my lighter, too. But it won't fit." She shrugged.
Chris smiled politely, and shrugged in reply.
"So much for the symbolic gesture. I can throw away my pack, though." She grabbed the pack and crumpled it, squeezing it forcefully into a ball.
"Tell you what, Emma. Bring all that stuff inside and you can throw it all away, for real, not just symbolically."
"Yeah, but I just want to do this one thing." She began jamming the irregularly-shaped wad into the opening. It looked to Chris like it wasn't about to fit.
Chris's feet were feeling slightly numb. He wanted to just go inside instead of waiting for her to follow, but he didn't feel he knew her well enough yet to do that politely. He didn't want her to guess his mistrust of her intent to quit. "For good this time" — a phrase that threw doubt upon itself if ever there was one. Chris already found himself missing having Eric here. Two people who knew each other so well that one never had to worry about small things like risking unintentional insult by such a small thing as not waiting for them while they did something pointless and arguably stupid on the spur of the moment. Life was so much easier when you lived with someone like that. You didn't waste half your waking hours dealing with nearly so much of the useless detail that was day-to-day existence. Of course, living alone was probably even better. But then life was too streamlined, or so Chris figured. Life became a greasy slide heading directly to the end with the fewest possible distractions. The idea wasn't to avoid distractions; it was to maximize the number of interesting distractions.
There was a tiny plastic thunk sound, and Chris saw that Emma had succeeded in getting the pack through the can's opening. "Congratulations," he said, with a hint of sarcasm. Hopefully not enough to be rude.
Emma, holding the can in her right hand by two fingers, stepped over to the top of the porch stairs, and drop-kicked the can. It described a perfect metallic parabola, landing squarely in the street where it bounced, spun, fell onto its side, and rolled back into the gutter.
"What are you doing?" Chris said, loudly in spite of himself.
"I kicked the habit!" Emma spoke through giggles. "See?"
"Yes," Chris said, recovering his composure. "Very droll." But what Chris wanted was for her to go pick up the can. However, he couldn't imagine how he might point out that this was what she should do without coming off sounding like a prick. He was on the point of just doing it himself, but his comforter and quilt would both trail on the ground and pick up all kinds of dirt and mud, plus whatever else was in the gutter. He therefore stood there for several seconds while his brain whirled around trying to escape the dilemma.
Emma finished laughing and, still looking down, gasped. "Chris! What are you doing, standing around out here with bare feet? Are you crazy? Get inside!"
Chris immediately reached for the doorknob again, grateful for the order. "Yeah, but," he began, and then pointed out to the street.
"Yeah yeah, don't worry about that, I'll go pick it up. Go inside before your feet fall off."
A few years after Chris and several of his friends had graduated from college and gradually re-settled in Seattle, Chris had been sitting in the backseat of Eric's car, riding directly behind Eric. They and Geoffrey and Christian were all driving home from having dinner together, or maybe an party that they had left early. Chris couldn't remember the original reason for their having been in the car together. Eric had convinced them that it was too early to go their separate ways, so they were driving more or less aimlessly while they discussed what they could do together next. Geoffrey was in favor of hitting a bar, but the others didn't really enjoy drinking for its own sake, so that idea had little overall appeal. Christian wanted to take the group back to his place for video games, but Eric expressed disdain for such a sedentary idea for a group activity. Chris didn't offer any suggestions, but simply helped to make fun of everyone else's suggestions. They were driving through part of downtown, and the weather was just starting to turn warm. People were out walking around, and Chris was happy just to be doing what they were doing now. He wouldn't have minded if they had just continued to drive around Seattle, enjoying the warm air, cooled off now by evening and the speed of the car, chatting with friends and making fun of each other's ideas of a good time.
Chris was suddenly struck with a feeling that he was, at that moment, truly a part of Seattle. Some switch in his brain had flipped, and he no longer felt that he was still a newcomer, learning his way around. Of course he was only really familiar with a few tiny areas of Seattle, but that didn't matter. Maybe, he thought, maybe the city itself had, just tonight, decided to accept him. It was a strangely animistic idea for someone so firmly aspiritual, but Chris enjoyed the image it presented, and since it went along with the out-of-nowhere good mood that had taken him over, he allowed himself to entertain the notion.
And then, Chris had stuck his head out the window and barked like a dog at a couple walking down the sidewalk in the other direction.
Without taking his eyes off the road, Eric shouted, "Chris!"
Chris eased himself back into his seat. "Yo!"
Eric's head shifted around as he tried to stare into Chris's eyes using the rearview mirror. "What the hell did you do that for?"
Chris shrugged. A goofy grin crossed his face. "I dunno. Just felt like barking."
There was silence in the car. Christian said nothing. Geoffrey, riding shotgun, shrugged his shoulders and looked out his window.
Eric said, "Okay," as if he had just come to a decision. At the upcoming intersection, Eric made a right turn.
Christian said, "Where are we going, Eric?"
Eric adopted a businesslike tone. "We are going back to find that couple that Chris barked at."
Chris frowned. "Why?"
"So Chris can apologize to them." Geoffrey snickered a bit but continued to look out his window.
"Eric, what the hell? Don't do that. Why should I apologize? I wasn't really meaning to bug them, I was just in a good mood is all."
"Should've thought of that before you barked at them while in my car." At the next intersection they made another right turn.
"Eric. Come on. Don't make a big deal out this." Chris tried to keep his tone of voice light, but his words gave him away. Eric's dispassionate tone told Chris that Eric was truly irritated with him, and Chris didn't quite understand why. He wanted to sit down somewhere quiet and work this out. If it had just been Chris and Eric in the car alone, Chris could have just talked to Eric, one on one. Chris had no problem drawing Eric out when they were alone together. But the others' presences changed everything. There was undoubtedly great potential for looking stupid, and Chris and Eric would both be unable to be bluntly honest in front of everybody.
"I'm not making a big deal out of this. You're the one who opened up the dialogue; they should have a chance to respond to you."
Chris said nothing, for fear of making matters worse.
Eric arrived at the next stoplight. He inched out past the stop line and into the intersection, craning his head forward, looking left and right, presumably trying to figure out in which direction the pedestrians were currently. He rolled forward some more, muttering. "Do you see them, Geoffrey?"
Geoffrey looked about as well, apparently on Eric's side. Or maybe just in favor of the more interesting possibility of a confrontation between strangers. "I don't really see them, no."
Eric let the car move forward another foot. "They couldn't have gone more than a block by now."
Geoffrey pointed off to the left. "I suppose that might be them over there."
Eric looked. "No, I don't think it's them."
"I didn't think so at first, either. But I don't see anyone else it could be."
Chris rolled his eyes, "Oh, come on Eric, just let it go."
Eric continued to scan the sidewalks. "Maybe you're right." Eric put on his left blinker and waited, halfway across the stop line, for the light to turn green. The light changed just before pedestrians arrived at the intersection and Eric immediately moved forward before anyone tried to jaywalk in front of him, as punishment for blocking the crosswalk. They drove back down the street. Chris looked out the window and saw that the pair of people they were approaching were two men.
"It's not them," Eric said to Geoffrey.
Geoffrey shrugged. "Yeah. Didn't really think it was."
Eric continued to drive carefully down the street, eyes half on the road, half on the people on the sidewalk.
Chris tried a different tack and put a heavy note of boredom in his voice. "Give it up, Eric. Let's just go."
The car had slowed almost to a stop as Eric examined everyone on the sidewalk as far as he could see. Finally he muttered, "Hell with it." At the next intersection the light was green, and Eric pulled a tight U-turn that just barely avoided swiping into the fortunately empty crosswalks.
"Jeez, Eric!" Christian said, breaking his silence. "You could get a big fucking ticket for doing that."
"Don't be ridiculous. It's perfectly legal to make a U-turn at an intersection, as long as there are no signs forbidding it."
Geoffrey looked over at Eric. "I thought you had to do it from a dedicated left-turn lane."
"No. What would be the point of that rule?"
Chris said, "I think Geoffrey meant that you had to have a left-turn-only signal."
Eric half turned in his seat without taking his eyes off the road. "Don't you start with me, jerk. What the hell is wrong with you, barking at that woman?"
"What is the freaking big deal, Eric? I was just in a good mood, is all."
"What does that have to do with it? How the hell does that explain you barking?"
Geoffrey smirked. "Guess he's barking mad."
"No puns, Geoffrey. Come on, Chris, give me a straight answer."
Chris looked out the window. A "straight answer" would ideally involve trying to communicate the giddiness he had been feeling, and the sense of belonging that had descended upon him, unasked but wonderfully welcome. Chris didn't see how he could hope to communicate anything so personal right now, with Eric's angry self-righteousness palpable in the air, even if he could ignore the funny looks that Christian and Geoffrey would undoubtedly give him.
"Just drop it, Eric," Chris finally said.
Eric huffed a little, facing the wheel, but he did drop it, to Chris's surprise.
Eric did bring it up again, though, the next day, when they were with other people. With the distance of time, and in a different group of people, Chris found himself able to defend himself a little better without delving into anything too personal. It slowly came out that Chris didn't realize that barking at a woman from a passing car was how rude young men insinuated that the woman was a "dog", i.e. unattractive. Chris was astounded to learn this, in fact. He had seen a couple of guys do this once and had thought that it was just an expression of exuberance, an acknowledgement of animal joys and passions that they were feeling at the time. An expression of basic happiness that had seemed to express clearer than any words the mix of emotions that were bubbling through him that evening. But what he had taken for a Whitmanesque embracing of the poetry of pre-verbal expression was just an expression of loutishness. And because he had unwittingly aped this obnoxious insult delivery, from a simple desire to communicate a feeling of being accepted, he had thus now laid out before his friends an display of naivete that was to them almost too profound to believe.
It was a very embarrassing experience for Chris. Everybody else in the room, once they had absorbed the complete story, could hardly stop laughing at him. Chris had wound up staring out the window while he waited for everyone to get it out of their system, feeling his face go hot and trying to will its color to drain back away. He could hardly blame anyone present for laughing at him — certainly he would have had he been in their shoes — but knowing that wasn't enough for him to feel any better about being the butt of this particular joke.
Once Eric figured out what was going on in Chris's head, however, he quickly stopped laughing, and soon afterwards he managed to change the subject to something neutral. And though others would occasionally remind Chris of the whole incident, Eric never brought it up again. Or at least not when Chris was around.
"Mind if I join you, stranger?"
Chris looked up. Eric was sliding into the seat across from him, setting down his cup and saucer carefully so as to avoid the newspaper Chris had spread out across the table.
"Eric. Good to see you." Chris started gathering up the sections and stacking them to one side. "It has been a few days, hasn't it?"
"It's been exactly a week, actually. Since last Sunday. How have you been?"
"Eh. I was sick for a couple of days, so I've been behind all week at work." Chris put away his pencil, wanting to be clear that Eric took precedence over the crossword puzzle. "Ended up having to go into work all day yesterday."
"That always sucks."
"Yeah. But, you know. Certain kinds of work are so much easier to do on the weekend, when nobody else is around. I was sort of thinking of going in for a bit today, in fact, after drinking my coffee." Which really meant after doing the crossword puzzle. For reasons that weren't entirely clear to Chris, he disliked mentioning that he worked on the crossword puzzle every Sunday afternoon. Crossword puzzles had a certain uncomplimentary aura, Chris felt. It may seem that people who did crossword puzzles on a regular basis would either have been privileged or upper-class, but in reality they were either retired or friendless or just extremely boring, it seemed to him. He knew that he was overreacting, and that really nobody in the world cared except him. And of course the staff at the Tourmaline knew how much time he wasted working on crossword puzzles; in fact it was just about the only thing they knew about him. But they were different from his friends — Chris didn't have to interact with them anywhere outside of the coffeeshop. As a result of this Chris had unconsciously taken to referring to his date with the newspaper, among his friends and acquaintances, as "drinking coffee". Since he nearly always did the crossword at the coffeeshop. It was a silly circumlocution, and half the time Chris wound up explaining what he really meant, when he confused someone unfamiliar with it. And of course all of his close friends knew what he really meant. But it had become a habit before he even realized what he was doing.
Eric shook his head. "Don't go into work today. It's Sunday. You'll be at work soon enough Monday morning anyway. Enjoy what's left of your weekend or you'll burn out again."
"It was just an idle thought, really. I probably won't go in. So what are you doing here?"
"I knew I'd find you here, that's what. Sipping on an Americano and doing the Sunday crossword."
Chris beamed. He hadn't expected how much he would enjoy seeing Eric today, and even more so to learn that Eric had specifically sought him out.
"How's the new roommate working out?"
Chris looked sideways at the table. "That's a work in progress, I think. It's been interesting so far, but where it's going to go in the end is anybody's guess. Like, it turns out she was a smoker. She quit right after she moved."
"Oh, great. So has she been climbing the walls?"
"Actually, no, I'm happy to say that she's been dealing with withdrawal in a relatively calm and reasonable fashion. Much better than I was expecting, at least. But I gotta tell you it was quite a surprise when I woke up the morning after she moved in and found her smoking on the front porch."
Eric smiled and nodded knowingly.
"That was supposedly her last cigarette, and so far it has been to the best of my knowledge. I just hope it stays that way." Chris ran his hands through his hair. "Other than that, I mean I guess it hasn't been so bad. She's kinda chatty, and her personal space isn't as large as one might wish, you know? Some of that may just be the no smoking. It does seem like it's hard for her to calm down. It's like she's got a lot of nervous energy. She doesn't relax much. That's a side effect of nicotine withdrawal, isn't it?"
Eric shrugged. "Yeah, maybe. I guess."
"Also Juan hasn't been around much lately. He's been hanging out with this guy he met, Fred, so a lot of time it's just Emma and me in the house. I'd feel a little more comfortable if Juan was around more right now. You know? At least until we get to know each other."
"Sure. How has she been with doing her share of the work and all?"
Chris shrugged. "So so. It's too early to tell. That's not a big deal, I don't think. Eventually we'll figure out something that works. I worry more about the personality stuff, since that's something you can't just ask a person to change." Chris reached for his coffee, but another thought struck him. "She's actually more like Juan than she is like me. It's really too bad Juan's not around more. They'd probably get along great and then she'd start to feel more settled down and like she belongs."
"Accepted into the household. No longer the stranger."
"Yeah. And I guess that makes me sort of the minority of the group."
"The 'minority'?"
"Yeah. I've never been the minority before. What if they start like throwing wild parties full of people like themselves? I'd have to move out eventually."
Eric leaned back in his chair. "Oh, you're just being paranoid."
"I guess."
"Juan's not going to try to squeeze you out. Neither is Emma. You think they object to you paying your share of the rent? Come on."
"No, but, you know — what if they want to replace me with one of their friends who likes talking up a storm, and who doesn't do the crossword puzzle every Sunday?"
Eric let his head fall back and gently chuckled at the ceiling. "Don't worry about it."
Chris stared thoughtfully at a window while he drank from his coffee. Outside he could see a crowd of friends walking down the sidewalk, everyone talking at once. He watched other people negotiate their way around them, and felt a brief but sharp pang of desire, wishing he were part of such a crowd of people once again. He turned back to Eric. "I don't really worry about it — it's just idle paranoia. My brain does this to keep me busy when I don't have a crossword puzzle to work on."
Eric smiled. "Well, maybe I should let you get back to work on your crossword puzzle then."
"No no," Chris reacted, almost as if Eric had been serious. "It's good to hear from you. How has life with Alicia been so far?"
Eric sat up and fiddled with the handle on his coffee cup. "Oh, it's been good. It has. But it's going to take some getting used to. At least on my part. She doesn't seem to be having much trouble adjusting. But this is a first for me. It's a little — the habits I've developed, you know, living with friends all these years, some of those habits don't really seem to fit well when you're living with a girlfriend instead. A partner, I should say. It's not that she's a girl. It's that she's my partner."
Chris waved a hand. "I knew what you meant the first time, Eric. So why is that such a problem?"
"Oh, it's not such a problem. It's just that, you know ... It's hard to say. I guess the problem is that with a partner, you don't have that level of emotional distance. You're all emotionally intertwined with each other. If you and I live together, and say I forget to do the dishes ..."
"Say you forget to do the dishes?"
Eric refused to be deterred. "... then you get annoyed maybe, or maybe you just blow it off — whatever it is, you aren't going to take it personally. It's not going to occur to you that this is an indication of some kind of lack of respect for you. It's just me being a slob."
"Has that happened with Alicia?"
"Not yet." Eric drank from his coffee and looked darkly into the distance over the rim. "But the signs are there. I can tell. And this is the scary thing — I've seen signs on both sides."
"Both sides of what?"
"I've seen signs of myself making that kind of leap. Oh look, she took my shaving things and just crammed them into the back behind all her skin cream stuff. She doesn't really respect me. She just wants to say she has a boyfriend without having to actually deal with one."
"Really? That really happened to you?"
"Well, I exaggerate for dramatic effect."
"It's true that you can be a bit overly particular about your things."
"You don't have to tell me that."
"Oh but I am telling you that, so you don't forget that it's not a big deal if you find yourself overreacting. You overreact when anybody moves your things around. It's not just because of this emotional intertanglement thingy you have with Alicia."
"Okay. Point taken."
"You'll be fine."
"It's only been a week. I'm not really worried. You just asked me how it was going and I answered."
"Yeah, I understand."
Eric suddenly put down his coffee and leaned forward. "Oh hey! Guess what? There's going to be a live performance tonight of some new music, including John Cage's 'Bacchanale'. Are you interested in going?"
"Uh, maybe? Is that one of his earlier works?" By "earlier", Chris meant pre-1950s, before Cage started using chance methods to compose works. Chris had found that he actually liked a lot Cage's work that was composed in the 1940s, but the stuff after that completely failed to engage him. Eric was a fan of both, so it was always good to ask.
"Yes, it's the very first prepared piano work he ever composed."
"Oh, right. Right. I remember that one now."
"The rest of the program is totally up in the air — I think it's a mostly some music students performing their own stuff. The John Cage is what they're hoping to draw people in to hear."
"Right. So the rest of it could be awful."
"Yeah. But it might not be awful. And anyway, how often do you get to hear a Cage prepared piano piece being played? Nobody bothers these days. I swear. Or any John Cage piece, for that matter."
Chris nodded sympathetically as Eric directed an annoyed expression out the window.
"You know, it's funny. John Cage spent so much of his life trying to advance the notion that the composer is unimportant, the composer is just a distraction, we should just listen to the music and forget about where it comes from. But in the end, everybody talks about John Cage and his ideas, and people hardly ever listen his music."
"It's a crime. You should write a letter to the editor and complain."
"Don't make fun of me. I'm serious."
"I'm not entirely unserious myself."
"Whatever." Eric drank his coffee.
Chris and Eric walked in the front door just as Emma was sitting down on the living room couch.
"Hey Chris, hey Eric. What's up?"
"Not much, I was just out drinking some coffee when Eric showed up."
Eric smiled and raised a hand. "Hey, Emma. All moved in okay?"
Emma smiled. "Yeah, no thanks to these slackers. Just kidding."
Eric sat down in the easy chair next to the closet door. "I love this chair. I was so tempted to steal it when I left."
"That is a great chair," Emma said. "Hey guys, Juan's in the kitchen. He and Fred are planning on making dinner for us! How's that for swank?"
Chris said, "Wow. Really? What is it?"
"Spaghetti with Fred's grandmother's sauce. We were talking about grandmothers and Fred started bragging about his grandmother's recipe for sauce, and by the time he'd wound down from that we were all hungry, so he and Juan decided to make some of it right here. I was in there trying to help but Fred kept shooing me out of the way, so I came in here to read the newspaper. You should go tell him Eric is here. Eric, you're going to join us, right?"
Eric looked uncertain. "That's not why I came over, actually. I was just here to pick up some things I missed."
"Oh, but you should join us. Come on, it's spaghetti, it's no problem to make more. And this guy Fred is practically falling all over himself to show off his spaghetti sauce to everyone. You'd be doing him a favor."
"Thanks for the offer, but I don't want to ditch Alicia with just an hour's notice."
Chris nodded understandingly, but Emma replied, "Why not invite her over, too."
"Oh, that would be a little presumptuous, don't you think?"
Emma stood. "Come on. Let's see how they feel."
Eric stood as well, and the two of them ventured into the kitchen, with Chris following close behind.
The kitchen smelled strongly of tomato paste, bacon, basil, and other spices. Chris couldn't help but start to feel a bit hungry.
"Wow, it smells great in here, guys," Emma said.
Juan looked up. "Thanks. Hey, Eric! Welcome back. Eric, have you met Fred yet?"
Fred turned around and examined Eric. Eric shook his head and held out a hand. "Yes we have. Hello again, Fred."
Fred nodded and took off the potholder he was wearing on his right hand. "Eric. Hello. The coffeeshop, right? You were talking about music?"
"Yep."
Emma leaned up against a clear spot on the kitchen counter. "So I was thinking Eric should stay for dinner."
Juan said, "Oh yeah. Eric, we're making spaghetti with a very special sauce. The sauce is special because it comes from a dead woman."
Fred jabbed Juan in the ribs with an elbow. "Knock it off."
"Dead-woman sauce over spaghetti. You know it's got to be good."
Emma spoke up again. "Anyway, Eric was saying that he couldn't stay because that would mean ditching his girlfriend Alicia."
Juan looked from Emma to Eric. "So invite her over, too. We got plenty of noodles, right?"
Chris said, "If there's not enough in the jar, there should be more in the top of that cupboard."
Juan nodded. "We got enough for everybody."
Eric said, "Thanks, Juan. Thanks, Fred. I'll give her a call right now." Eric left to return to the living room where the phone was.
Emma nodded at the stove. "So how's it coming along?"
Fred walked over to the sink, in which a collander rested with chopped green onions on the bottom. "Just fine so far. Cilantro is the only thing that's missing so far, which is no big deal, especially with all the other stuff."
Chris remained standing in the doorway. Juan was measuring out more spaghetti noodles, an amount of which he kept in each hand, apparently waiting for comfirmation of Alicia's presence. The kitchen was starting to warm up with steam from the boiling water on the stove. It reminded Chris strongly of childhood, coming home after playing outside in the cold, to find the kitchen deliciously warm and full of steam and smells of dinner. Juan suddenly began banging the two bundles of dry noodles together in a dotted rhythm, as if they were some exotic percussion instrument. Fred turned around to see Juan approaching him, stepping in exaggerated style in time to the rhythm, and then when he was close enough he began tapping a faster rhythm on the top of Fred's head with the noodles.
Fred ducked. "Hey, knock it off. People have to eat that, you know."
Chris reappeared. "Alicia'll be over in a few minutes."
Juan said, "All right then." He spun around, jumped across the kitchen to the stove, and dumped both handfuls of noodles into the pot.
There wasn't really room for six people around the diminuitive table served as the dinner table. Chris actually thought that they could have made it suffice, but in the end everyone just chose to eat in the living room. Eric and Alicia wound up sitting on the couch with Chris, and Emma took the easy chair. Juan and Fred were the last to sit down, being the cooks, so they sat on chairs taken into the living from the dining room.
Eating on a couch left Chris with a subtle sense of cognitive dissonance. It was the backward leaning, he decided, that was the problem. Dining room chairs had straight backs, so that when food dripped it dripped onto your plate, or maybe the napkin in your lap. Chris had to sit hunched forward in order to keep from dripping spaghetti sauce onto his shirt.
Alicia leaned forward, her long blonde hair narrowly avoiding being trailed through Fred's grandmother's spaghetti sauce. Alicia directed hazel-colored eyes at Chris, and said through a mouthful of noodles, "So Chris, are you going to this concert tonight?"
Chris swallowed. "Yes, Chris invited me earlier this afternoon. I presume you're going as well?"
"No, actually, I'm not going."
"Oh. Do you have other plans?"
"No, I'm just going to stay home and relax."
Eric shook his head incrementally and mouthed "not interested" at Chris. Chris had thought that Alicia shared interest in at least some of Eric's musical tastes. Chris vaguely remember that Alicia and Chris had gone to see Bill Horist perform recently — a local musician who liked to play electric guitar with various objects woven into the strings.
Juan said, "What's the concert, Eric? Is it some John Cage thing?"
Eric fumbled with a napkin. "Actually, Juan, it is some John Cage thing. There is a real honest-to-god John Cage work on the program."
Juan turned to Fred, "Did I ever tell you about this John Cage guy that Eric's into?"
Eric continued. "You should come, Juan. Cage's music doesn't get performed live all that often. You'll finally get to hear what it sounds like."
"Eric, I already know what John Cage sounds like."
"Yes, but it's live."
"Remember who bought you those headphones for Christmas two years ago."
"They're playing the original prepared piano piece."
"That was a gift to me as much as it was to you."
"But listen to me."
Alicia interjected, "Those headphones have become a gift to me now."
"Listen. It's the original prepared piano piece, the pieces that made John Cage invent the prepared piano in the first place. You know he was living right here in Seattle when he did that?"
"No, Eric," Juan said loudly. "I didn't know that."
Chris had to admit to himself that he hadn't known that either. John Cage was very much a part of the New York scene, and he had naturally assumed that he had lived there all his life.
"Yep. In the 1930s he was at Cornish, and he was supposed to be writing music to accompany a dance. He was really into all-percussion music at the time and so he wanted to write a percussion work for the dance. But the stage was too small; there wasn't room for a bunch of percussion players and their instruments. He was stuck with writing a solo piano work." Eric was balancing his plate of spaghetti on his lap while he gestured with both hands, pretending to play the keys of an imaginary piano, the napkin in his left hand and the fork in his right. "So he got the idea of changing the piano to sound more like a percussion ensemble, by preparing it, placing objects between the strings." Chris's hands mimed inserting small items between the strings inside a piano. "He wrote the whole piece in two or three days, before it was due to be performed at Cornish." He raised his arms. "Voila. The prepared piano was born."
Juan shook his head, "That's all very interesting, Eric. But."
"Oh, come on."
Chris jumped into the conversation. "You know, Eric, this is an early John Cage piece. It's not his aleatoric stuff. It's got rhythm and all that stuff."
"Plus it's just one prepared piano work. The rest of the concert is all different stuff."
Juan was still looking bemused at the idea when Fred said, "We should go, actually."
Juan looked up at him, startled. "You want to go to this?"
"Yeah, why not?"
"Fred, you haven't heard the music this guy listens to."
"Oh, I'm sure it's not horrible."
"You shouldn't talk about things of which you know nothing."
"I mean come on. He said it's got rhythm and all that stuff. I like music with rhythm. I think it sounds interesting."
Juan looked doubtful. "Are you sure? You really have no idea how awful the music this guy likes can get. I know. You should listen to me as a more informed person on the subject."
"It sounds like fun. Eric, how much are tickets?"
"Eight bucks each." Eric swiped at his mouth with his napkin. "But if you're interested in coming, I'll buy half your ticket."
"There, Juan. What a deal. You can't beat that."
Juan looked at Eric. "You really want to go?"
Eric spread his hands. "Why not? It's a historic work of twentieth century music. Every American should be familiar with John Cage ..."
"I'm plenty familiar with John Cage already, thanks."
"... with John Cage's prepared piano. It's part of our musical heritage."
Juan pointed his fork at Eric. "You promise it's not going to be like that plink-plonk-bang-bang stuff?"
Eric speared a knot of noodles. "Even assuming that that sentence was meaningful, I'm only making promises about the John Cage work. The rest of the concert is an open question and I can make no promises there."
Chris said, "Juan, I will promise you that the John Cage piece is not like that plink-plong-bing-bang stuff." Chris knew exactly what Juan was referring to. Eric had been in his room listening to "Music of Changes", John Cage's first completely aleatoric piece for piano. Eric had had the volume up quite loud — he had been lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling, letting the music arrive without any prior expectation, trying to take it all in as if it were a natural event, rain falling on a forest of pine trees, or a school of glaciers bumping into each other. From outside Eric's bedroom door, however, the disjointed notes had taken on an almost comic pointillism. Chris and Juan were passing each other in the hall, and both had stopped to listen. After a while Juan had shaken his head and said, "Plink! Plonk! Bang bang! Look at me, I'm a composer!" and then continued on his way.
While Chris had only heard a recording of "Bacchanale" once before, he did remember that it was primitivist, rather reminescent of parts of Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring", and so felt confident that while Juan may or may not enjoy the music, he would not be put off by it in the same way that he had been put off by "Music of Changes".
Emma looked around. "Well, if all you folks are going, I want to go, too."
Chris gestured to her, "Please, feel free to join us. I'll pay for half your ticket as well." Alicia gave Eric a look at this, but said nothing.
Chris looked over at her. "Emma, do you know anything about twentieth-century classical music?"
"No. That's why I'm going. To hear what it's like."
Chris shrugged. "Okay. Well, that's cool that everyone wants to come along."
"It'll be great. I was wondering what I was going to do with my evening. I hate always doing nothing on Sunday evenings. This town is so dead on Sundays. Should I dress up for this? Is it a dress-up kind of event?"
Eric replied, "Probably not specifically, no. I mean, you can certainly get dressed up. But I think it's safe to say that the majority of people there will be dressed casually. I'm going like I am. But on the other hand, you know, if you were to get dressed up semi-fancy, you probably wouldn't look noticeably out of place. Concerts are one of those events where everyone has a different idea of what's appropriate. And anyway, this is Seattle. Nobody really worries too much about that sort of thing anyway."
"Hmm. Okay. Well, maybe I'll go see what I have. Or maybe I'll just wear this. I don't know. It'd be kind of cool to dress up, but it'd also be nice to just not hassle with it, too."
Fred said, "What time does this start?"
Eric said, "It starts at eight. We should be try to be there by seven forty. Seven thirty, maybe. Not that I think that it's going to be crowded. But if there's ... one two three four five of us going, we should get there early if we want to try to sit together." Eric turned to Alicia. "Alicia? You change your mind about going maybe?"
Alicia smiled diplomatically at Eric. "I've already made plans with my friends. We're going to see a movie." Chris smiled to himself. He knew that Chris wasn't a big fan of movies in general. Given provocation, he would complain at length about the preponderance of stupid plots, cheap two-dimensional characterizations, and he always had something scathing to say about the soundtrack music.
"All right then. I just thought I'd check."
"Thank you for thinking of me."
"I'm always thinking of you, dear."
"Mmm, that's sweet." Alicia leaned forward and the two of them kissed. Chris concentrated on picking up the last few spaghetti noodles on his plate while Eric and Alicia got that out of their system.
Fred said to Juan, "You don't mind going to this, do you?"
"No. It's not my first choice for spending an evening, but it'll be interesting, I'm sure, one way or another. If it's really bad we can always leave, right?"
"Right."
"And head back to your place." Juan's voice dropped to a low mutter, and he looked at Fred pointedly.
Fred grinned, but looked a bit uncomfortable. After staring at his plate, he glanced around the room to see if anyone was paying attention. Chris suddenly felt self-conscious and turned to Emma.
Emma stood up, putting her plate down on the end table. "I'm going to go check out what I have to wear."
Chris, having no one else to safely direct his attention to, walked over to the end table, stacked Emma's plate on top of his own, and took them both into the kitchen.
As it turned out, the concert had two Cage pieces. In addition to "Bacchanale", there was a work entitled "Inlets", which neither Eric nor Chris had hear of, but its year (1977) meant that it could be just about anything. The rest of the concert appeared to be student works, as the composers' names could all be found among the performers.
The seating turned out to be unpadded wooden auditorium chairs. Not the most comfortable, but Chris figured, what can you expect for a student production?
Emma had chosen to get dressed up in the end, and Chris couldn't help but wonder if she felt overdressed for the occasion. Everyone else in the room was dressed as casual as the damp weather permitted. She appears to be perfectly happy, though. She was wearing a strappy black gown, with hose and heels, but Chris had been most struck by the makeup. It was the first time he had seen her wearing makeup, and Chris had gotten used to thinking of her as someone who didn't wear makeup. Now, she was wearing heavy eyeliner and it made her look like a completely different person. It was disconcerting, and Chris found himself occasionally staring at her, but then wanting to avoid looking at her when she was talking. Fortunately, now that they were seated, he could remain facing the stage when he addressed her without looking like he was trying to avoid meeting her eyes.
"Are you cold at all, Emma?"
"No, I'm okay. I've got my leather jacket if I get cold."
"True." Chris thought that a leather jacket didn't really go well with her gown. Not really formal wear. Maybe it didn't matter with jackets. Or maybe the jacket was expensive enough that it went with anything formal.
"It'll warm up in here soon enough with all these people, anyway."
"You're probably right." Chris felt a vague urge to apologize for being in casual clothes, leaving her the only dressed-up one in their group, but decided that she knew what was going on when she decided to dress up.
"Ugh," Emma said. "God damn it. This dress still smells like cigarette smoke. I suppose I'm gonna have to get it dry cleaned to get the smell out."
Chris sniffed the air. "I don't really smell anything."
"It's gross."
Eric nudged him on the left. "This is interesting. Did you see this? The first work on the program, 'Inward-Turned Eyes' by Dale Masterson? It comes right before 'Bacchanale'."
"Yeah?"
"And it's scored for saxaphone and prepared piano."
"Okay."
"Dale Masterson is listed as playing the prepared piano for both works. But what's interesting to me is, according to the program notes, 'Inward-Turned Eyes' uses the same preparations as 'Bacchanale.'"
"Ah."
"Yeah."
"That's kind of a cool idea."
"I guess he figured that since he already has to prepare the piano, he might as well get as much mileage out of it as he can."
"Preparing a piano isn't really a lot of work, is it?"
"Probably not, no. Although I bet you have to really work over the school to get permission to do it. Hi, I'm a music student here, would you folks mind if I take one of your grand pianos and stick a bunch of screws and weather stripping inside of it for a while?"
"I wonder if Dale Masterson had to prepare the piano every day that he wanted to work on his music, or practice playing 'Bacchanale', or if he just prepared it once and left it that way for a few months?"
Eric shrugged. "Probably the former. I wouldn't trust the stuff to fall out if you just left it there that long. And then how would you get it out again?"
Chris shook his head. "You'd have to get a bunch of movers to come over and turn the piano upside-down and shake it."
"Now there's an image."
The lights dimmed soon after, and a young man wearing a black turtleneck sweater appeared on stage to polite applause. He was followed out by another young man bearing an alto saxaphone. The two of them got situated in their places while the audience shuffled around and then fell still.
The music began with an quiet aria from the saxophone, which travelled rapidly up and down the instrument's register, then after a few louder notes landed quietly on a single, low tone which the saxaphonists held for a long time. During this tone, the piano jumped in. The piano was playing fast, frenetic runs of notes. Each run was slightly different from the previous run; the piano seemed almost to be exploring every possible combination of a handful of figures. Most of the notes had that quiet, hollow sound that Chris had come to associate with the prepared piano.
There was a muffled laugh from the audience, off to Chris's left. It was followed by another, also quickly stifled. Chris looked around. What was that about? Were people laughing at the sound of the prepared piano. He supposed that it was a bit surprising, if one had never heard it before. But still. He noticed that Eric was frowning but stonily keeping his gaze fixed on the stage. Chris focused his attention back to the music.
"Inward-Turned Eyes" turned out in the end to be an okay piece, for a student composition. Thankfully it showed significant borrowings from more popular music genres, and thus lacked the really stringent influences of twelve-tone composition which Chris felt sure would have put off just about everyone except Eric and maybe himself. On the other hand, Chris had to wonder if the composer would have been better off selecting someone other than John Cage as the concert's draw.
"Bacchanale" was well-played. Chris had forgotten, when he had reassured Juan and Fred that it was rhythmically interesting, that there was a prolonged quiet middle section which featured only three or four different notes and was highly repetitive. Fortunately Dale Masterson did not linger excessively over this section, and played through it speedily.
After "Bacchanale" was "Study No. 2", by Roger Anthill, which turned out to be the saxophonist playing solo. Chris suspected that the "study" actually included a prolonged improvised movement, based on the sudden reversion of the complex melodic line halfway through to a recitation of the standard sounds of improvised jazz saxophone, which then after a few minutes worked its way back into the original melody, for a final few measures of coda.
The lights came up for the intermission as they applauded. Eric turned to Chris. "Look everybody! I can play all the jazz standards!" He mimed playing an air saxophone. "Look, this is what it sounds like when Charlie Parker improvised!"
"Eric, not so loud."
"Oh what, he's gonna hear me from the stage?"
"Well, his friends are probably in the audience too."
Eric rolled his eyes.
"Besides, what if I really liked it? Wouldn't you be embarrassed at being so rude then?"
"Heck no. If you liked it why should you care what I think?"
Chris shook his head and dropped it. He turned to Emma. "Hey, Emma. What did you think?"
"So that's what a prepared piano sounds like, huh?"
"That's one way it can sound, yes. In theory it can sound a lot of different ways."
"That's pretty cool. He does that by sticking things on the strings?"
Eric leaned over. "Between the strings, actually. If you just put something on top of the strings, it bounces around and won't stay in place."
"Huh. Do you think it would be okay to go up on stage and look inside the piano during intermission?"
Eric said, "I don't see why not." He stood up. Emma got to her feet and began moving towards the aisle. Since Chris was inbetween them, he stood up and followed.
The three of them walked directly up onto the low stage and peered into the piano. About a dozen pair strings had a screw, a bolt, or a thick piece of felt inserted between them. The foreign objects appeared at varying positions along the strings — some near the middle, others close to where the dampers sat.
Emma said, after a pause, "That's really cool. What a neat idea."
"Glad you liked it," said an unfamiliar voice. Chris turned around; Dale Masterson was standing behind them.
"Sorry folks, but we gotta get set up for the second part here."
Emma piped up, "Sorry, my fault. I just wanted to see what a prepared piano looked like. On the inside, you know."
Dale's smile didn't waver. "No apologies necessary. We just have a short time in which to get set up here. You can come back up on stage if you want after the second half is over." And so the trio quickly left the stage and returned to their seats.
As they sat down again, Fred leaned across Juan to address them. "What were doing up there?"
Eric said, "Just checking out the piano."
"That piano was really weird-sounding. I almost started laughing."
Chris leaned forward, "You were the one who was laughing!"
"No, it wasn't me. I swear. I wanted to laugh but I managed to hold it in. That was someone else who lost it. Over in that part of the audience." Fred waved at the rows behind them.
"Why did you want to laugh, though? What's so funny?"
"I dunno. The piano just sounded like it was majorly broken. Sorry, folks, this was the best piano we could afford. Dong, dong, thud."
Eric shook his head. "Fucking Philistines. Every last one of you."
"Inlets", the first piece after the intermission, turned out to be from the other end of the Cagean spectrum. Undoubtedly one of the "manuscript pieces", Chris thought, although the program notes didn't specify — meaning that the score was nothing more than some instructions in English. Several people on stage held conch shells filled with water, which they would tip this way and that to produce tiny gurgling sounds as the water flowed between chambers. Even with the contact microphones, the sounds produced were extremely quiet, and could just barely be heard above the background hum of the amplification equipment. After a few minutes of this, the saxophone player, who had been sitting motionless to one side, held up a conch shell and blew into it. The sound was really quite loud, especially after the silence of the first few minutes, and Chris heard more than one person yelp with surprise when it began. The saxophone player used circular breathing techniques to keep the conch shell sounding for as long as possible. By the time he put his shell down again, he was quite red in the face. Another minute or two of quiet gurgling sounds proceeded, and Chris half felt that he himself might start laughing. Then a prerecorded sound of a fire (burning pine cones, according to the program notes) was introduced, slowly increasing in volume until it was quite loud. All throughout the performers on stage never took their eyes off of their conch shells, slowly tipping them this way and that. This continued for a few minutes before it slowly diminished back into silence. Finally, after another few minutes of unaccompanied gurgles, the performers put down their shells one by one. When the last one had stopped, they turned to face the audience, whose applause was a bit perfunctory to Chris's ears.
There was one final student work on the program. Which was probably a good thing. If the program had listed a third John Cage piece, Chris was willing to bet that people would be walking out in droves after "Inlets". He looked over at Emma. "How are you holding up?"
She smiled. "I'm fine."
"Sorry that last piece was so boring."
She looked as if considering this idea for the first time. "Yeah, it was a little long, wasn't it?"
"A little long? I half expected you to have fallen asleep."
"Oh, ssh." Emma gestured to the stage. Dale Masterson was back, this time with an electronic keyboard, along with another one of the conch shell tippers, now holding a violin. A third person sat behind and to the left of Dale.
The final piece, titled "Broken Boat", was quite a contrast to "Inlets". But then, almost anything would have been. It was extremely bouncy, despite the way that the rhythms never settled down for more than a few measures before being disrupted. The violin never got screechily high-pitched for more than a second or two at a time, something that was Chris's least favorite aspect of the instrument. The keyboard changed timbre several times, changing from sounding like a real piano into a harpsichord, or maybe a garbage can ensemble. This piece appeared to be the only one in which the composer didn't perform. Unless he was the page-turner, which is who the third person onstage turned out to be.
When the piece was done, it got the loudest applause of the evening, although that may have been just because it was the last applause of the evening. The other performers came back on stage for a brief bow. Then, Dale stepped forward and signaled for quiet. When the applause stopped he quickly pointed out the door through which the reception was being held and encouraged everyone to attend. The performers left the stage to some residual applause, and the audience began to move towards the exit indicated.
Chris remained seated for a moment. "What did you think, Eric?"
"All in all, not a bad show. The second Cage work, I could have done without. But then, they would have had only 20 minutes of material for their concert, and where would that leave them?"
"That's very cyncial of you."
"You know it's the main reason it was included. They sure didn't add it to the program to attract the kids."
Emma prodded Chris's back. "Hey! What are you sitting there for? Let's go to the reception."
The reception, Chris decided, made up for having to sit on unpadded chairs. Not that the ticket price was unreasonable anyway, but having something to munch on afterwards was a definite bonus. Chris appreciated students who accepted that people weren't going to show up to hear music composed by a bunch of complete unknowns without a little bribery. There was a grand spread of crackers and cheeses, and someone had even sprung for a box of red wine. Chris helped himself to coffee instead.
Juan handed Fred a plate of crackers and cheeses, then helped himself to some. "So, Fred, what did you think?"
"Okay. First of all, that bit with the conch shells was about ten times longer than it needed to be."
Eric said, "I figured you would say something like that."
"Oh, come on man. Glug glug ... pause ... glug glug. Oh jeez. And when that guy started blowing into his shell, I thought I was going to wet myself."
Juan nodded. "I just about jumped out of my own skin."
"As far as I can tell, scaring the hell out of the audience was the sole reason for that whole part. John Cage could have ended it right there. If he had, I would have more respect for him."
"Sounds to me like you need more practice listening to quote-unquote 'non-musical' sounds."
Chris nudged Eric. "Oh come on, Eric. Even you didn't like it all that much."
Juan said, "I liked the last number. That one was fun. It had some energy."
Fred said, "I loved watching the violin player on that one. He'd do this thing where he was sawing back and forth, and then he'd just stop, and he'd be perfectly still, just motionless, while the keyboard player's going at it, and then he'd just start playing again, back and forth. Watching him was a trip."
Eric said, "What about the saxophone piece? What did you think of that?"
Fred shrugged and shook his head. Juan said, "That one was boring. I don't know. I'm sure if I had studied the saxophone, I might have enjoyed it. It seemed to me that the guy obviously knew his instrument really well. If I cared about that stuff, I probably would have been impressed. But I don't. So it wasn't very interesting."
Fred asked, "What did you think of it, Eric?"
Eric shook his head. "Way too derivative for my taste."
Juan said, "See, that's the kind of thing I'm talking about. I have no idea what you mean by that, and that's why it wasn't interesting to me."
Chris said, "I completely failed to understand what you meant by that."
Eric said, "I think the opening work was probably the highlight of the concert. As far as the student works go, anyway."
"Which one was that?" asked Fred.
Juan said, "You know, the one that made you laugh."
"Oh right. I didn't really get much of an impression from that one."
Juan said, "Other than, hey that piano's broken!"
Fred laughed and looked a bit sheepish. "Yeah."
Juan looked at Eric and Chris. "Where's Emma, anyway?"
Chris looked around. "There she is. Looks like she talking with someone else." He guestured vaguely.
Eric looked, "Oh, I think that's the keyboard player. Dale Masterson."
Chris looked again. "Yeah, you're right."
Eric said, "Come on. Let's go over. I want to talk to him."
Chris shrugged. "Okay."
As the two came up behind Emma, they could hear Dale saying, "... so when they're situated at nodal points, they allow harmonics of the fundamental to be heard."
Eric tapped her bare shoulder. "Hey, Emma."
Emma turned around. "Oh hey." She turned back again. "Dale, this is Eric. It was his idea for all of us to come here tonight."
Dale smoothly shifted his attention from Emma to Eric. "Thanks so much for coming." He held out his hand. "And for bringing your friends. That's the best gift you can give a composer, you know — more ears in the audience."
Eric smiled in a lopsided way, and Chris could tell that Eric was put off by Dale's smooth behavior. Nonetheless he said, "Good concert. I'm always happy to see people actually performing Cage's music and not just talking about it."
"Thanks. I'm right there with you."
"Oh. And this is Chris," Emma suddenly put in.
Again that seamless shift of attention. "Nice to meet you, Chris." Dale extended his hand. "Thanks for coming."
Eric said, "Chris and I were speculating earlier that you chose to use the same preparations as Bacchanale so you wouldn't have to prepare two pianos for one concert." Chris had noticed before that Eric liked to talk to musicians about the more mundane, technical aspects of putting on a concert. Sometimes the questions could seem almost impertinent — like now, Dale might take Eric to be insinuating that he was lazy. Chris wished Eric would get to know people better before dropping such diplomatic considerations. Though he would be the first to admit that it sometimes led to experiences that made for interesting stories down the road.
Fortunately Dale seemed to understand the spirit of Eric's question. At least he wasn't taken aback by it. "Actually, it would be closer to the truth to say that I decided to perform Bacchanale because I already had the piano prepared for it."
"Oh, really? How's that?"
"Well, I became interested in the prepared piano, fascinated really, in the last year or so. I've been listening to Cage's prepared piano pieces a lot, and learning to play some of them myself. And it struck me that every single piece uses a different set of preparations. One or two exceptions, but for the most part each one is different. Now, a piano with a different set of preparations is almost a completely different instrument. So it's sort of a funny situation, because you've got all these different piano-like instruments, and each one has only had a single piece of music written for it. Which seems like a waste. So I thought maybe I should try to fix that. So I wrote a piece for the Bacchanale prepared piano, since it was first. I was sort of thinking I'd try to hit each of them, one at a time."
Emma said, "Oh! How interesting. You should have put that in the program notes."
Eric said, "That's a big project."
Dale shrugged. "Yeah. I probably won't be able to follow through. We'll see. It's a nice idea to think about, though."
Eric said, "I certainly agree with the sentiment behind it, at least. What I'm curious about is why you chose 'Inlets' as your other Cage piece. It's a pretty sharp contrast to the rest of the music on the concert."
Dale smiled, "True. True. We hoped that the contrast would would be a bit of a break from the other music. As for why we chose that particular piece, well you know, both 'Bacchanale' and 'Inlets' were composed by John Cage here in Seattle."
"No, I didn't. I knew about Bacchanale, of course, but I didn't know about 'Inlets'. I never even heard of 'Inlets' before tonight. That was composed in 1977? So was Cage living in Seattle in 1977?"
"Oh, no. He was just visiting. The piece was composed for a dance that Merce Cunningham was performing."
"I see. Hey, I'd like to ask you, if I may, about some of the keyboard settings you used in 'Broken Boat'."
Dale blinked. "Fire away."
Chris knew from experience that the ensuing conversation was likely to be rather dry, if not unintelligible, to a non-keyboardist. He looked over at Emma, but she appeared to be interested in the conversation. Probably she had no idea the direction it was about to take. Chris decided to wander back to the others and see how they were doing.
Chris found Juan and Fred stationed over by the box of wine. They encouraged Chris to try some, and he had to admit that it wasn't really all that bad. Their conversation wandered into a discussion of recent movies.
Eventually, Emma came over to join them, reporting, "Those two are hip-deep in conversation about 'Synclaviers' and 'Mellotrons' and I don't know what else. I'm afraid we're going to have to pull them apart when we want to leave."
Chris smiled. "Worst case, we can always take a cab."
"Is Eric always like that?"
"No — only when he's with another keyboard player. Then yes."
Emma sighed. "I was actually enjoying talking with Dale before you two came over. But now they're talking about all this tech stuff I know nothing about, and I can't follow it at all."
Chris raised an eyebrow. "I'm sorry. Did we interrupt anything?"
"No. I mean, yeah. Sort of. But no, we were just talking about prepared pianos, so trust me. You didn't 'interrupt' anything. We were just talking. It's just then the conversation was where I could follow it, and now it's not."
"But ... there was something going on?" Chris persisted. "Between you and Dale?"
Emma shrugged. "Maybe. Too early to tell, though. Way too early. How's that wine, Juan?"
"Sorry. Had it occurred to me, I would have kept Chris away from him."
Emma laughed. "Oh, don't worry about it." She accepted a shallow plastic glass of wine from Fred with a smile. "Hey, with Eric being my friend, this will probably give me a better chance of seeing Dale again."
Chris nodded. "I suppose that's true."
"But you know, this is all just speculation." She took a sip from her glass and laughed curtly. "Half of it is just, 'Look, I got all dressed up in this gown, I ought to take advantage of it while I'm in it.'"
Several years had passed since Chris's last girlfriend, and he still wasn't quite ready to say that he missed it. On some levels, he did miss being in a relationship. Part of him missed the sex, certainly. Another part of him felt that he had learned a lot about himself and what really mattered to him since his last involvement, and wanted to see how much better he could handle the ups and downs of a relationship with the improved understanding of his self. And part of him just missed the challenge — the undertaking of a project, in a manner of speaking, that was emotionally engaging. (His job provided lots of projects, of course, but only rarely did he become emotionally engaged in them to a significant degree.) And yet, all of these parts didn't quite add up to enough to tip Chris out of the balance that he had found himself in.
The last romantic entanglement had been with Irene, who had been a case of "opposites attract". Irene had had little interest in "serious" music and even less in computers. She was loud and energetic, and seemed to be most comfortable when she was in a bar and it was after midnight. Chris enjoyed perching on the windowsill of her life, so different from his, and watching how it worked. Similarly, she seemed to get a kick out of watching the breakers of her boisterous world break against his calm, careful exterior. A big part of what kept them together, Chris suspected, was simply the fact of knowing that she was attracted to him despite not really liking a lot of his personality traits. And vice versa, of course.
Opposites do attract, Chris had decided, but only for a while. After the novelty of each other had worn down, they found their misaligned approaches to the world exhausting to deal with, and the relationship had quietly fell apart. Irene had ended it sooner than Chris had expected. They both could see where it was going, but Chris had been figuring it was worth riding out a while longer yet. He had been vaguely insulted by getting dumped, but it amounted to no more than a minor insult to the ego, and he had quickly recovered the rhythms and habits of his single self.
Since that time, he had met several women, but had invariably wound up forming friendships with them, friendships which somehow precluded the idea of evolving into a romantic relationship. Chris figured that the women probably wouldn't have been interested in any case, but it was a little surprising to him that he had shown no interest in trying to steer things in that direction. Looking at himself dispassionately and comparing his behavior with that of his younger self, he was forced to admit that something had changed, something within himself. He wouldn't want to complain — the friendships had been fun, and at the time all that he had asked for — but still. Some part of him wondered if, perhaps, some bit had been flipped in his brain, some circuit rewired, and he was no longer capable of pursuing a girlfriend. Or maybe his sex drive was running down, with age, and had passed below some critical mass level that made it impossible to gather the necessary effort towards seeking someone out. Perhaps Irene was his last girlfriend, and it was just a matter of time until he, resigned to his fate, would start hiring the occasional prostitute to satisfy a lingering, vestigial, and asymptotically dwindling appetite.
Part of the problem is that Chris had a hard time imagining how he might have moved from friendship to something more with any of the women he had met since Irene. Alicia — well, Alicia had long since become Eric's girlfriend, and it was nearly impossible and vaguely distateful to pursue any sort of hypothetical involving her, at this point in time. Chris still occasionally wondered if her friendship with him had been more motivated by an early, unconscious glimmering of what would later become her interest for Eric. Dorothy, on the other hand, had remained unattached for almost two years after Chris got to know her. She hadn't really been his type, physically speaking, and Chris could say with some confidence that he hadn't been hers either. But they had had no end of fun hanging out together, talking about music (her tastes were much closer to the mainstream than Chris's, but they both spent a lot of time thinking about what they listened to, and so they had greatly enjoyed introducing each other to their favorites) and whatever else was going on in their lives. Chris had since lost touch with Dorothy — her current boyfriend lived in Redmond, and he suspected that she didn't get over to Seattle as much as she once had.
Stace, now, was closer to being Chris's type. But she was a co-worker, and she wasn't so attractive that Chris could ignore the can of worms that getting involved with her would entail. And besides, they now had a pretty enjoyable friendship. Trying to turn it into a romantic involvement would mainly, Chris felt, risk ruining the friendship. And it just didn't seem all that likely that the potential romantic relationship with Stace would work out as well as the already established friendship with Stace. Maybe it would. But Chris wouldn't give it better than fifty-fifty odds, from where he stood now. And if it didn't work out, there was a pretty good chance that the friendship wouldn't survive intact. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. So to speak.
Now he was looking at a fourth potentional female friendship, with Emma. He hoped that at least a passing friendship would develop there, otherwise it was going to be an uncomfortable lease period. And again, she wasn't really his type, so he didn't foresee anything more than that in the wings. (Especially not if Dale was an exemplar of her type.) Chris actually began to wonder if he had a clear idea of what his type was, anymore. Certainly he could think of certain women that were drop-dead beautiful, but he wasn't sure if he could come up with a more average-looking, everyday woman — i.e. the sort of woman who might actually have a smattering of interest in him — who he could think of as being "his type".
And really, that was all that was going to happen, because part of the issue here was that Chris was content with his friendships. Really, when viewed from a distance, romantic relationships had their positive aspects, but in the final tally they hadn't been as valuable to him as his friendships. More often than not they were far less fulfilling than just an average friendship.
Though perhaps less dramatic. But drama only got you so far in life. In the long run it didn't really satisfy. Chris had decided that he preferred the majority of the drama in his life to happen to those around him. It was almost as much fun that way, and far less aggravating.
"Hey, Chris." Juan was at his shoulder, holding an paper plate empty but for some crumbs. "None of us know anyone here except each other. Is there any reason for us to continue hanging around here, other than to mooch off their boxed wine?"
Chris looked around. The crowd at the reception definitely appeared to have thinned out some. It was probably time to go.
"No, no reason at all. Except that I expect that we may have a bit of a time prying Eric off of that Dale guy, if they're still talking about keyboards."
Juan rolled his eyes, then leaned over to Fred. "Eric is a keyboard geek — he can talk at you about keyboards till you're ready to vomit up your own stomach to make him go away."
Fred cackled. "What? Vomit up your stomach? Where did that come from?"
"You know, like a sea cucumber?"
"Hey Juan, where's Emma?"
Juan looked about them, as if thinking Emma might be hiding behind Chris. "Dammit, we're not making progress here."
"Oh, don't panic. I bet she's with Eric and Dale." Chris walked over to the general area where he had left Eric, and spotted them. They had drifted over to a table against the wall. Dale was leaning against the table, hands in his pockets. Eric was holding a pen in one hand, for some reason, and was talking rapidly to Dale. Emma was standing with them — or rather she was standing next to them. She was listening but the body language of the group indicated that she wasn't really involved in the dialogue. Her stance suggested to Chris that she was getting tired of standing in her heels, and would have appreciated the chance to take them off, or at least sit down for a while.
Chris walked up to Eric and slapped him gently on the arm. "Hey there." Chris hated to interrupt other people, but with Eric it was more or less necessary. "We're about ready to leave."
Eric froze in mid-sentence. "Really? Oh. Uh, okay. Is it that late?" Eric seemed to be stalling.
Dale reached into his pocket. "Hey, here." He pulled out his wallet, from which he extracted a card. "Let me use your pen."
Eric quickly handed Dale his pen, and watched as Dale, holding the wallet and card in his left hand, scrawled a phone number on the back of the card. He handed the card and pen to Eric. "Just let me know as soon as you can. If it looks good, we'll hammer out the details."
"Right. Sounds like a plan. I'll make sure to give you a call this week and let you know. Monday or Tuesday. Wednesday at the latest."
"Wednesday at the latest. Okay." Dale nodded at nothing in particular, then returned his wallet to his pocket. "All right." He extended his hand. "Good meeting you, Eric." Eric shook his hand with a barely controlled energy. Dale shook hands with the others in turn. "Good meeting you, too, Emma. What was your name again? Chris? Chris. Thanks for coming out, all of you. Good night."
Eric nodded again, and turned, ready to break off and return to the world of the familiar. "Oh man." Eric's walk was like his handshake, moving with excess energy that seemed ready to burst out and leave him lying on the ground in spasms. "Holy cow."
Chris followed Eric. "Hey. Hey, Eric. What's up? What are you all holy-cow-ing about?"
"Jeez. You're not going to believe it." Eric rejoined Juan and Fred. Juan looked at the approaching trio, and said "Oh, there you are. Thought you had left us here."
"Juan, Fred, do you mind if we hit a coffeeshop on the way home?"
Juan shrugged. "No, I don't mind. It's early."
"All right. Let's go. I need some coffee."
They were seated at a booth in an International House of Pancakes.
Juan had wanted to go to an actual coffeeshop, but Eric had been driving and hadn't been paying attention to other people's suggestions. He had kept trying to talk while driving, explaining how he and Dale had been discussing various keyboard instruments and their various individual advantages, filling in the background for his surprise. But Emma, in the front seat, had already heard the conversation the first time, and Juan and Fred would presumably have had only a marginal interest, so Eric had attempted to mostly direct his remarks at Chris, and since Chris was seated directly behind Eric, he had given the impression that he was only marginally aware of what was happening on the road in front of him. Much less Juan's suggestions of various espresso stands in the neighborhood. When Eric had pulled into the parking lot of IHOP, which Chris suspected he had done while running more or less on autopilot, Juan had reacted with disbelief. "Oh, come on Eric, we can do so much better than this." But Eric had just shrugged at Juan and said, "For god's sake, Juan, it's just coffee."
Now they were crammed into a booth, Chris and Eric sitting opposite each other against the wall, Juan and Fred sitting close together on Eric's side, and Emma sitting with Chris. Eric had dropped his story as they were being seated. The waitress handed them all menus and gestured with the coffee urn in her left hand. "Coffee for anyone?"
Eric turned his coffee cup right-side up. "Please." Fred and Emma did likewise.
Juan said, "Can I get a tall latte with a shot of almond?"
Chris shook his head, feeling that he had probably had too much coffee already for a Sunday evening. "I'll just have water, I think."
The waitress nodded and left.
Juan turned to Fred. "Can I taste your coffee before you put anything in it?"
Eric leaned into the table, ready to resume his story with a air of anticipation. "So then, Dale and I, we're talking about his keyboard, and then, out of the blue, he asks me if I had performed my own music much." His eyes glittered as he looked around the table.
"Your own music?" Chris looked at Eric, waiting for the punchline.
"I didn't know you composed, Eric," said Fred.
"He doesn't. You don't, Eric, do you?" Juan said. "Man, this coffee is awful. How can you drink this stuff?"
Chris said, "Eric, why did he ask you that?"
Eric shrugged, looking as if he could hardly be expected to know the answer when it mattered so little. "I don't know. All I can think of is that he must have thought that I wouldn't have been interested in the same keyboards as him unless I wanted to be a composer, too."
Chris nodded grudgingly. "I could kind of see that."
Emma leaned back in her seat. "And, so. Come on, Eric, tell them what you said."
Fred jumped in. "I would have said, oh yeah, I perform at Benaroya Hall at least once a year, you know, the usual, stuff like that. I would have tried to just blow his mind. Freak him out."
Eric shook his head and adopted a rueful expression. "Well, I didn't say anything that stupid, but I did sort of lie."
Chris blinked. "What exactly did you tell him?"
"I just — I just sort of, you know, sort of bobbed my head up and down. Tried to play it cool."
"You're trying to say that you nodded your head."
"It wasn't a nod exactly. It just kind of this ambiguous indication of ... positive-ness. You know?"
"Give me a break, Eric."
"Like I could have been saying, yes, I have performed my own music in the past, or I could have been saying, yes, that's a fine idea, I would really like it if I had."
"Don't kid yourself."
"Well cut me some slack. What was I supposed to do? I couldn't admit that I was just some poseur with a fetish for keyboard instruments."
"No, but you didn't have to lie."
"Hey. When somebody mistakes you for someone more interesting than who you are, that's the universe's way of telling you that's who you should be instead."
"That's real deep, Eric."
Fred laughed out loud. "That's great. I'm going to make that my personal philosophy."
Juan shook his head. "Well, let's just pray that nobody ever mistakes either of you people for an airline pilot."
Emma grinned and make shoo-ing motions at Juan and Fred. "So come on Eric. Tell them what happened next."
Eric smiled, clearly savoring the moment of suspension. "So Dale asks me if I would be willing to do a performance next month with him."
Chris said, "Are you serious?"
Emma giggled quietly.
Fred said, "Oh, man! Busted already! Now you're going to have to come up with the goods."
Chris stared at Eric. "Just like that? Hi there, good to meet you, want to perform with me?"
"I know!" Eric said loudly. "It's fucking unbelievable. I don't know what happened. I guess he really like me. Something about our conversation made him think I was a serious composer type like him. Or something."
"Well, but so what did you say to him?"
"He said it had to be an original composition, never performed publicly before. Everyone on the program is doing first-time performances of their own stuff. That's the supposed draw. It has to be between five and ten minutes long."
"And you said you'd do it. Didn't you." Chris could tell what the answer had to be by the way Eric was ticking off all these details, but some part of him still wanted him to say it.
"I didn't commit to anything just yet, but I told him that I didn't see any reason why I wouldn't be able to do it."
"Oh my god."
"I know."
"You little poseur."
"Look, Chris, how could I have possibly done otherwise?"
"What, are you allergic to being honest with strangers or something?"
"No but think about it. Opportunity just knocked at my door. Do you think something like this is ever going to happen to me again? There aren't a lot of venues for new music performance, you know. And it's nearly impossible for outsiders to break into. It's all about who you know."
"It can't be as hard as all that, can it?" asked Fred. "How many composers of 'new music'" — he traced quote marks in the air — "can there be? If you're playing guitar in some rock band, sure, you've got to compete with ten million other bands."
"Yeah, Fred, but that's just it. The field is so tiny, it's really insular. Most of them aren't interested in sharing what little exposure they have."
Chris said, "Eric, since when have you even wanted to be a composer? I mean, I don't remember you ever talking about this before."
"Well, no, not as such. But I mean, come on. Sure I'd like to be a successful composer. Who wouldn't? But I don't have any illusions that I have what it takes. I mean, you have to devote your life to it, and I just don't have that kind of mind. I know my limitations. I can understand music, but I doubt I could say very much in it. Nothing that anyone else would want to hear at least. But don't you see! That's just it."
"What's just it?"
"I don't have to want to be a successful composer. Dale's not asking me to be a good composer. I just have to be a composer, period. And just for one performance. If the audience hates it, who cares? It doesn't matter. I don't have a career to build up. Even if Dale hates it, that's fine. The worst thing that'll happen is that he'll never ask me to perform with him again, and frankly that'd be just fine with me."
"So you're just going be a composer for a month."
"Exactly. For one month, I will be a modern musical composer."
Juan said, "And at the end of that month, you will be unmasked as a fraud in front of a live audience."
Eric said nothing. He just bobbed his head.
Emma sat back in the booth. "Ugh. This coffee just makes me want to smoke a cigarette."
Chris said, "So, Eric, what exactly do you plan to do?"
"Well, for starters, I plan to compose an original five-minute musical work between now and then."
"You don't say. I think we'd already established that. How do you plan to go about doing that, is what I was really asking."
"I'm not sure."
"You're not sure. Well, imagine my surprise."
Emma said, "Have you ever composed anything before?"
Eric seemed to give this question serious consideration for a moment. "I guess it depends on how broadly you define the word 'composed'."
Fred laughed loudly. "Translation: No."
Eric ignored this. "Well, for example, a few years ago, Chris and I made this —"
Chris interrupted. "Oh, no, that doesn't count."
"— we made this collage work. What do you mean it doesn't count?"
"That was two guys messing around with multitrack mixing program."
"How is that any different from what a composer does?"
"And a bunch of samples that were included with the software."
"We were working with the materials that were at hand."
"Come on. What you were doing may seem like composing to your feverish brain right now, but all I was doing was trying to make funny noises."
"Which is all composing is really."
"And maybe make you crack up."
"The point is still that composing is no different from that. Not substantially. You just do the same thing with a more serious goal in mind."
Juan said, "You're doomed."
"Thanks for the vote of confidence."
"You're going to get up there and use a keyboard to make random noises for five minutes, and the audience is going to hate you."
Fred said, "The people will probably throw rotten tomatoes. Hey, poseur! This is what I think of you wasting my time!"
Eric rolled his eyes. "The audience is not going to hate me."
But Fred was on a roll now. "Your music is an insult to my intelligence!" He mimed throwing a rotten tomato. "Splat! The keyboard shorts out. It blows a fuse. The whole place is plunged into darkness. People get trampled as everybody runs for the exits."
"Are you through yet?"
Fred shrugged noncommittally. "I could be through."
"The audience is not going to hate me, Fred. Nobody's making you come anyway."
"Are you kidding? Of course I'll come. It'll be hilarious."
"The audience is not going to hate me, and do you know why?"
Eric waited for a response, but Fred seemed to have assumed that it was a rhetorical question. In any case he remained silent. Chris finally supplied the expected response: "Why, Eric?"
"Because composers are not some kind of demigods who walk the earth. They're people just like you or me. The people who get up there and perform music that they've composed themselves, they don't have some kind of license that certifies that their creations aren't going to be crap."
Juan broke in. "You don't need to tell us that. There was a little bit of crap in the concert we all just sat through, you know."
Fred grinned. He pretended to hold a conch shell delicately in his hands. "Glug, glug."
Eric said, "Knock it off. I'm trying to make a serious point here. My god you guys are annoying all of a sudden. How much wine did you drink anyway?"
Fred and Juan gave each other arch looks, and then the two of them simultaneously burst out laughing.
Eric tried to speak over them, apparently unwilling to drop the issue. "You see what I'm saying though. Don't you? The only thing that separates a composer from a non-composer is the willingness to get out there and actually compose something. That's all there is to it."
Fred said, "Yes, but the question I'm asking is what separates a good composer from a bad composer."
Juan said, half under his breath, "Excessive interest in conch-shell based composing techniques." And the pair began laughing at each other again.
Emma was laughing as well, but still she smiled at Eric and said, "I think you'll do fine, Eric. Seriously. It sounds like a really cool opportunity."
Chris was torn between the desire to show Eric his support — for in the final count he pretty much agreed with what Eric was saying, that having the courage to get up and do something was really the most important ingredient — and a nagging feeling that Eric's stretching of the truth had gotten in just a little bit over his head, and that the whole thing could backfire on him in ways that were hard to foresee.
But then again, maybe Chris's misgivings were borne more from a twinge of jealousy. This opportunity had fallen into Eric's lap, and while it wasn't entirely undeserved, admittedly, it seemed that Eric had been given the option, if only for a short time, of throwing away his current life and starting over with a new one, one that was far more unique and satisfying. It just didn't seem entirely fair that someone should be given such a chance without having to work for it first.
They wound up not staying long at the restaurant. Juan's interest in hanging out had cooled when the venue had turned out to be the International House of Pancakes, and nobody was particularly hungry. When the waitress had discovered that they weren't ordering food she seemed to largely forget about them, and after waiting around for refills on the coffee while Juan displayed his boredom the others had been convinced to leave.
Back in the car, Emma had chosen to take the back seat, leaving Chris sitting up front. As soon as they were moving forward Fred began talking, to nobody in particular.
"I was in a restaurant, a few years ago, where this guy just collapsed in the middle of his breakfast. It was freaky. They called 911, and all these paramedics came. They came right into the restaurant and just crowded around this guy lying on the floor. This one guy tells the waitstaff to like make room for them, so they can work on the guy, and so they have to move all these tables around, these tables that customers are in the middle of eating off of. Some of the people are just all freaked out, like, hey we can't sit here and eat our breakfast while this guy is lying on the floor dying. And some other people are just going, hey, whatever. Just shrugging their shoulders. You know? Maybe they're thinking, circle of life, death comes to everyone, no big deal. Or maybe they're thinking, my food's here already, no point in letting it go to waste. Whatever's going on, the thing is like some people leave, but most people stay, right? And so I had been thinking of leaving, because you know, it just seemed to rude to like sit there and munch on my food and watch this guy have a heart attack. If it was me lying on the floor having a heart attack I wouldn't want people to just sit there and watch me while they were eating breakfast. But then I see that most people are staying, and I figure, well, the paramedics are probably going to take him to the hospital in a minute or two anyway. They aren't going to hang around doing all this emergency stuff in the middle of a restaurant any longer than they can help it. And it occurs to me that actually, if it was me on the floor having a heart attack, I probably wouldn't care at all what anyone else was doing. I'd probably be so busy trying to stay alive I would hardly even notice the paramedics. So I decide okay, I'll stay, eat my food. And the restaurant, the staff turns the sign from open to closed while this is going on, but they're being real friendly and encouraging everyone to stay who wants to stay. So I'm staying. And most people are staying. The place is still pretty full. But, everyone's being really quiet, because the paramedics are all talking back and forth with each other, and nobody wants to bother them, or like make it hard for them to hear each other. So people are talking to each other in whispers, or they're just not talking at all. And everyone's watching the paramedics. They can't talk, the whole place is quiet, and there's like this unusual event going on in the same room, so of course everyone's watching them. What else is there to do? And with all the tables shoved out in a circle around them, it's almost like they're watching a show. It's almost like it's some kind of dinner theater play. It's a little real-life drama, but it looks like a play. Some of the people, they got lucky and wound up with front-row seats. But all of us have a pretty good view, pretty much. And this actually goes on for a while. I'm talking real quiet with my friend, because it still seems rude to me to just sit there and stare at the poor guy, so I'm trying to like do something else, like actually distract myself from all this. But every now and then I look over there, and they're still working on him. They've brought in a stretcher on wheels, and everything, but it's just standing there. They're all still kneeling on the floor over this guy. One of them has one of those big plastic balls stuck over his mouth, squeezing it to force him to breathe I guess. They've got electrodes or something attached to his chest — and he's bare-chested, right away one of the first things they did is just cut his shirt into pieces and tore it off. Oh! And there's this toddler, who's just totally fascinated by all this. He's watching this going on, and he's loving every minute of it. There's an ambulance parked outside, and it's just all totally exciting to him. There is no doubt that he's entertained. Every once in a while he shouts, 'Boom!' in this big happy voice. For no apparent reason, except that I guess his excitement is just so big, you know, he can barely contain himself. And every time he yells like that his mom goes, 'Tyler, get back here.' Okay, but so like the whole thing feels like a show, right? For the kid it probably felt exactly like a show. Tyler probably couldn't tell the difference between what was going on and his mom watching 'ER' on the television. But so then the paramedics, they finally get the guy stabilized or whatever, they finally decide that they can get him out of the restaurant and take him to the hospital without him dying on the way there. So they get him onto the stretcher on wheels, and start wheeling him over to the front door, and I swear this is true, people start applauding. It wasn't just a few people here and there, either. A whole bunch of people are clapping. I mean, I'm sure they're applauding to say, great work, saving that guy's life, god bless you, yada yada. But in the context of the whole thing it was just this totally surreal moment. I felt for a second that I had fallen into a parallel universe and maybe this really was a play after all. Maybe I was in a world where every time someone had a stroke in public, everyone just naturally gathered around to enjoy the show. Oh yeah, and when the kid, Tyler, hears everyone else applauding, he starts clapping his hands together. Only he's not very good at it, so he's like holding one hand palm up and he kind of just drops his other hand onto it, and half the time he just misses. He's laughing, I'm sure the whole thing is best fun he's had in his entire life. He's clapping in this really uncoordinated way, and then, all of a sudden, he gets this really serious expression on his face, like maybe deep down he understands what's been going on all along, and when the paramedics go out the door of the restaurant with the guy in the stretcher, the kid, Tyler, waves one hand and says, 'Bye bye. Bye bye.' And it was just so surreal. I thought I was going to just lose it. It was all just too much. Too much freakiness from life, coming in all at once. What a weird day that was."
Chris half-turned in his seat and looked searchingly at Fred. "Fred, not to be rude or anything, but what on earth does that story have to do with anything?"
Fred shrugged. "Well, we were just in a restaurant. It made me think of that."
"So Chris. You gotta help me with this."
They were back at the house. Emma had gone to her bedroom to change, and Juan and Fred had disappeared. Eric was sitting in middle of the couch, hunched forward, elbows resting on his knees. The way he appeared to Chris, it was as if he had never moved out.
"Help you? What do you need my help for?" Chris dropped into the easy chair.
"Help me write this thing."
"Eric, I'm not a composer."
"Neither am I."
"Hey, you just got through going on about how you were a composer, how the only thing that separates composers from the rest of us was doing it, or whatever."
"Okay, but I'm not a composer yet. Look, Chris, I just need help brainstorming. And maybe with some computer stuff. I don't know. I don't know what I'm going to need. But right now what I need are ideas."
"Ideas for what to write? You mean, like, how about you write something in G minor?"
"Well, maybe. But see, that's an example of something I can't do. All that tonality stuff, I never studied enough music theory. There's absolutely nothing I can do with major or minor keys that hasn't already been done a million times. I mean yes I can write something that just happens to be in a key, but it isn't going to be interesting for that reason. It'll have to have some other reason why it's interesting."
"So you're asking me to come up with ideas for how to make something interesting?"
"Yes. Basically. That's exactly it. I need ideas for things that don't require you to have studied music to be able to follow through with. Entry level things that are still interesting."
"Okay, here's one. I got an interesting idea for you."
Eric leaned forward eagerly. "What is it?"
"Minimalism."
Eric's face fell. "Okay, no. I already promised myself, minimalism is my last resort. The absolute last resort. If I still don't have a piece of music the night before the concert, I'll make up some chord progressions and stretch them out to five minutes and call it minimalism."
Chris smiled. "Otherwise, no?"
Eric held out a wavering hand. "I may incorporate certain, measured amounts of minimalistic elements. But not as the main focus. Not as the music's ... raison d'etre. You know my stance on minimalism."
"Okay. So no easy answers."
"Well, not that particular easy answer. I mean, I am looking for some kind of easy answer in a way. But not that one. Please god no."
"Hm. Well, I'll think about it."
"Just think about music you've listened to that you really like. What are some of the things that you like, that you think wouldn't be too hard for someone without a lot musical training to do? That's the way I'm thinking about this."
"I can't promise I'll come up with anything useful, Eric. But I'll give it some thought."
"Okay."
"It's getting late by now, though. The coffee is starting to wear off, and I need to be at work tomorrow at a decent hour."
"Oh, okay." Eric got to his feet. "Think about it. Maybe we can get together and brainstorm later on?"
Chris stood. "Sure. Some time when we both have time."
"Okay. Soon though? I'd like to have some kind of idea of what I'm doing before I talk to Dale."
"Sure. Maybe tomorrow evening. Any time, really. Call me, or I'll call you, we'll figure something out."
Eric headed to the front door. "Okay. Thanks, Chris."
"No problem. Thanks for driving us all around. It was a fun evening."
"Yeah, it was fun. And bizarre. But fun, too. We should get together and do things like this more often. Okay. See you soon. Good night."
"Night, Eric."
Chris sat down in front of his computer, inside his cubicle, and stared at the floating polygons on the screen for a moment. He had just come back from a late lunch, and it was time to get some work done.
A couple of years ago Chris had discovered the secret to making Mondays palatable, and that was to avoid doing any work on the weekends whenever possible. In his early years as a professional programmer, Chris had worked at least a few hours on nearly every weekend. There was always a looming deadline that you weren't going to make at your current rate of progress. There was always more that you could be doing in a single day. Over time, though, the constant slipping of deadlines meant that it became nearly impossible to take any deadline seriously. Like many professional programmers, once they get comfortable, Chris's overtime work ethic began to slack off with each passing year. Then, Chris found himself working a temporary job at a credit union. Banks, Chris discovered, Existed outside of the tech industry and its newly-minted expectations. Chris's boss had been working for the same company since before Chris was born. And it was clear, without having to have it spelled out, that the last thing he expected, even from a programmer, was for Chris to come in to the office to work on the weekends. Chris found that by not working on the weekends, he resented Monday's arrival far less than he ever had. This seemed somewhat paradoxical to Chris, since it seemed like taking the entire weekend off would merely throw Mondays into sharp relief. When your weekend still involved work, you shouldn't really care about the weekend being over. But, that's not how it turned out to be.
Chris was now back in the tech industry, as a full-time employee, so he had to deal with the quiet but persistent expectation that he would come in and work on weekends every now and then. Sometimes it was truly unavoidable, since the company's website was expected to be up twenty-four hours a day, every day. A major crisis occuring over the weekend that involved his code could still bring him into the office on minimal notice, for example. But Chris resisted the pressure (and occasionally the temptation) to volunteer to work on the weekends. And in doing so he discovered that Monday's blow was softened yet further, because the first half of Monday was inevitably spent sorting through the email and bug reports that accumulated over the weekend. Work that was necessary and somewhat tedious, but low-stress and requiring very little effort from Chris. By the time his backlog was cleared away, almost without fail Monday would be half over. Lunch could then be taken, and then a half day of real work would be enough to finish off the day.
It was time now for the real work to begin. Chris leaned back in his chair, and thumped the underside of his desk with his right knee. This caused his mouse to move ever so slightly, deactivating the screen saver. He pulled up the source code which he had been looking at Friday afternoon. There was a bug in the code he had just written last week, and he was pretty sure it was in this file, only he hadn't found anything that looked wrong with it yet. He should probably bring it up in the debugger, but at this point that felt tantamount to admitting defeat. The code wasn't that complex, and he felt that the error should be visible ...
Chris's phone rang. Chris briefly considered ignoring it, then decided he wasn't deep enough into the code yet to justify doing so. He grabbed the receiver with one hand while idly paging up and down through the source code with the other.
"Chris here."
"Hi. You got a minute?"
"Eric?"
"Yeah."
"I suppose I can spare a minute. What's up?"
"I need your help with my composition. I'm desperate for suggestions."
"Eric, I thought we were going to meet this week and talk about it then."
"That's too long from now. I can't waste any time."
"Why are you in such a panic all of a sudden? You've got a month to do this. A few days won't make any difference."
"I don't even have a month. The concert is actually the first week of next month. I have less than two weeks."
"Okay, look. How about we get together tonight? Maybe do dinner first?"
"No, I need some ideas now. I have some free time right now, I don't want to waste it sitting around. But I can't think clearly. I need some suggestions from someone who isn't freaking out."
Chris closed his eyes in his effort to transmit calmness across the telephone line. "Eric. Chill out. Calm down. You're acting ridiculous."
"Dale called me this morning."
"Oh. I thought you were going to call him."
"I was. I was going to call him Wednesday, after I'd figured out enough to bluff my way through this. But something came up with the performance space, and they told Dale that they had to have a commitment from him right away. So he called me up and told me that I had to make a commitment right away. Or else bow out."
"I see. I didn't know he even had your phone number."
"He didn't. He looked me up in the phone book and got your number. I guess Juan answered the phone and gave him my new number."
"And Alicia gave him your work number."
"No. I'm at home. I stayed home from work today. I called in sick. I wouldn't have been any good at work anyway, because I can't stop thinking about this composition."
"So you're committed to doing this now."
"I am. I'm committed to creating and performing an original work. Between five and ten minutes long if at all possible. He said if it was longer that we'd have to work out the logistics. I told him it was more likely to be on the shorter side. I didn't tell him that I'll be lucky if I manage to compose a full five minutes of music. And there were all these technical details we had to agree upon. I told him I would be supplying all the instruments and performers. I said I would probably just be performing alone, but I might bring someone else to perform part of it live, so it wasn't just me sitting in front of a keyboard doing nothing half of the time. I shouldn't have said anything, but at the time I thought I should be trying to keep my options open. Right away he starts pushing me to make sure that at least one part of the music was being performed live all the way through. Apparently audiences get restless if they have to sit watching people doing nothing while a computer makes all the music, even if it's just twenty or thirty seconds. I'm not sure if I buy that, really. I mean, maybe the audiences he's used to. But I don't want to piss him off by arguing with him at this point. We've got to get along at least until the performance. Chris?"
"Eric?"
"What the hell have I gotten myself into? I've fucking volunteered to sit down underneath the Sword of Damocles, that's what I've done."
"Eric, you're panicking. That's all it is, panic. Okay? Your brain just needs to panic for a while, and once it's done panicking, you'll go back to being a sane human being. And then, maybe you can start thinking about trying to compose something."
"No, I can't blow the afternoon off. I already took the day off from work. I can't do that too many times between now and then; I have to make the most of it."
"Eric, you're acting like a total basket case. What the hell do even think I can do for you?"
"Just give me some ideas. I'm a barren landscape right now when it comes to ideas. Everything I can think of myself is total shit. It sounds completely stupid. My brain is a trackless desert of musical concepts. It's a soundless void of ideas. A sucking vacuum of nothingness."
"I got the picture, Eric."
"Just give me something to start with. Anything. I'm sure once I have a starting point, it'll be a lot easier. I'll have somewhere to work from."
"Oh, Eric. You're just doubting yourself. Anything I give you is going to be just as stupid as the stuff you come up with on your own."
"Come on. Just think."
Chris rolled his eyes up to the drop-tile ceiling. He hated taking personal calls in a cubicle, where there was really no privacy. But at this point it would almost certainly be faster to give Eric something than to convince him to let Chris go. Chris thought about Eric sitting at home, having pretended to be sick to take the day off, which reminded him of his own recent illness. "Hey. Okay. Here is something."
"What?"
"I don't know if it's worth anything, but it's an idea."
"That's all I'm asking for."
"Back in college, I once spent nearly an hour listening to this guy Bob practicing 'The Engulfed Cathedral'. You know, the Debussy piano piece?"
"You mean 'The Sunken Cathedral'?"
"I've always heard it as 'The Engulfed Cathedral'."
"Whatever. I've heard the piece. It's from the first book of Images, if memory serves."
"That's the one."
"What about it?"
"This guy Bob was having trouble with this one passage, so for several minutes he was practicing that passage by playing this one measure over and over and over again, without stopping. And what was interesting was that instead of getting on my nerves, I actually kind of started to enjoy listening to it. I was doing homework at the time, and it actually felt like it was helping me focus."
"Okay."
"So. There's an interesting musical idea."
"But that's just minimalism. I told you, minimalism is the last resort."
"Not necessarily. Look, it would be minimalism if you just played that and nothing else. But what if that was just one layer. Just use it like a bass line.
Eric was silent. Chris took that as a good sign.
"You know, you wouldn't call rock music minimalism just because the bass and drums keep doing the same thing over and over. Instead they become a foundation, and then the guitar and voice builds on top of that to make the, uh, the interesting stuff."
"So I could take a recording of 'The Sunken Cathedral' and find this one measure, record it, and loop it. And then I could use that as a bass line."
"Yeah. Or, you know you don't have to use that particular measure. I'm sure that one measure wasn't magical or anything. You could listen to Debussy and pick something out of it that you find interesting. You know, when Steve Reich made 'Come Out', he listened to hours and hours of tape to find the one-second long sample that he used."
"I don't much care for 'Come Out' myself. It's kind of interesting to hear it described, but the actual experience is pretty flat."
"That's not my point, Eric."
"Okay, I know."
"It doesn't need to be Debussy. Just pick someone whose music you think might have an interesting moment and grab something from that. I know you like Satie more than Debussy, for example."
"You know, you don't even have to use an actual sample. You could just find something that you like the sound, and then write something of your own that sounds similar."
"I dunno about that. I don't understand tonal music enough to write it myself. Remember?"
"It doesn't have to be tonal."
"But if it's keyboard music it's going to have tonality. Because I don't even know enough to avoid tonality."
"I have no idea what you mean by that."
"If I started babbling random syllables, I would probably wind up speaking a few words in French by accident because I don't know enough French to avoid speaking French. So if I try to compose something at a keyboard, it's going to make references to tonal music, and I won't understand it well enough to know what it's saying. To know what expectations that it's setting up in my listeners. Which I will then fail to follow through on."
"Eric. Come on. You're just second-guessing yourself." The screen saver on Chris's computer returned. He began to feel that no matter what he said, Eric would find a reason why he couldn't do it. He felt a sudden desire to get off the phone and work on his code. "Eric, listen to me. I read about John Zorn working with the Kronos Quartet one time, and he was recording a piece that he wanted to have improvised sections. But the Kronos Quartet folks, they're like technicians. Very detail-oriented. They had hardly ever been called on to improvise before, and it wasn't really their style. It wasn't their forte, and John Zorn could tell that they were uncomfortable with the whole idea, of having to just make something up on the spot. So he would say to them, okay, at this point I want you to improvise for five seconds. And they would say, oh! Is that all? Well, if it's just five seconds, I can do that."
Eric was silent for a moment. Chris pressed the point home.
"You, Eric, can write one lousy measure of tonal music. I know that you can do that."
"Hm."
"Just find a snippet of music you like, and then imitate it. That's much better than using a sample, because that way it's yours. And you can modify it later. You can transpose it to a different key if you need to, or speed it up or slow it down."
Eric was still silent.
"This, doing this, will give you a place to start."
"You're right. It will give me a place to start."
"Of course I'm right. I'm always right."
"A place to start."
"Which is exactly what you wanted."
"That is what I asked for, isn't it?"
"Yes. I've given you precisely what you asked for."
"Okay." Eric's voice came back with sudden energy. "I'll do it! Thanks, Chris. I gotta go."
"Goodbye. And good luck."
The line went dead. Chris set the receiver back down in the phone's cradle. He blew out a long breath. These next two weeks could turn out to be a very, very long two weeks. Chris thumped the desk with his knee, and returned to examining his code.
On Tuesday evening, Chris got home from work a few minutes after eight. He entered the living room to find Emma and Juan sprawled out in the living room, eating what appeared to be macaroni and cheese out of plastic bowls.
"Hey there. Macaroni and cheese, eh? You folks regressing to your days as starving artists?" Chris had eaten his share of macaroni and cheese when he was a college student and could just barely afford his textbooks. Since becoming a professional computer programmer, he had refused to touch the stuff.
"Chris," said Juan. "Grab a bowl and have some. You may need to warm it up in the microwave for a few seconds. But it's really good."
Chris shook his head. "No thanks. Not really my thing. Sure, it has a certain 'poor white trash' cachet, but that really only gets you so far where food is concerned. It doesn't make up for being day-glow in color."
"No, man, this stuff is different. Emma made it with dill and a bunch of other shit. And there's a little bit of hamburger in there, too. It's really cool. Here." Juan forked out a few noodles. "Try some." He held the business end of the fork out to Chris.
Chris looked at the bright orange noodles in front of him. They looked as unappetizing as he remembered them being. But it sounded as if Emma had done more than just heat up water. If she had actually combined several ingredients from a recipe not provided on the box, then Chris figured that probably counted as "cooking", even it if was basically macaroni and cheese, and therefore he risked insulting her if he didn't try it.
Chris took the fork from Juan and ate the noodles. To his surprise they actually weren't all that bad. In addition to dill, there was also a hint of mustard, or maybe mustard seed. And the bit of hamburger broke through the monotony of cheesiness that permeated the stuff of Chris's memory.
"Okay. I'm impressed. For starting out with macaroni and cheese, that's pretty tasty."
"Get yourself a bowl and join us."
Chris wavered. Despite his praise, he had a vague premonition that just the sight of the orange noodles in front of him would wind up souring his appetite, no matter how they actually tasted. But he did need to eat something for dinner, and this was available. Being a professional programmer didn't mean that he was any more willing to turn down free food that someone else had already made. Chris went into the kitchen. The remaining noodles were sitting in a pot on the counter. For a moment Chris was tempted to just eat from the pot directly — another habit he associated with college. Instead he transferred the noodles to a proper bowl. He chose a porcelain bowl instead of a plastic one in the hopes of avoiding further associations with college food.
Back in the living room, he sat down on the couch next to Juan, who said. "We were just talking about Emma's not smoking when you arrived."
Emma smiled. "Today is my one-week anniversary of quitting smoking!"
Chris said, "Actually, wouldn't that be tomorrow?"
"Technically, I suppose yeah. But it was just one cigarette in the early morning, so I'm just counting that day as a whole day. So I quit on Tuesday, and today is Tuesday, so today is the anniversary."
"Congratulations."
"Thank you." Emma rocked back and forth in a pleased fashion.
"So is it getting any easier?"
"You know, I think it's finally starting to." Emma stared thoughtfully for a moment at the noodles in her bowl. "Like for example, I think there were several long periods today I went without even thinking about smoking. And the periods where I did think about wanting to smoke didn't last for too long. The feeling comes, I ride it out for a while, and then I manage to think about something else again."
"Cool. That sounds like improvement."
"Oh definitely," Emma said around a mouthful, then swallowed. "But you know, actually it's been a lot easier this time than it was before. I really think I did the right thing by moving out of that house. If I was still there, I'd be surrounded by people smoking all the time, and it would just be impossible to take my mind off of cigarettes."
Juan said, "You know, Fred was smoking when I first met him. I figured he was a smoker at first, but then I found out later he only smokes when he's in a bar. I can kind of understand that, because you're surrounded by smokers when you're in a bar. Everybody's just puffing up a storm. It doesn't help if you don't light up yourself; you'll still get almost as much smoke as if you had. And no matter what you're gonna come home smelling of it. So you might as well have the fun of smoking yourself."
"Yeah," said Chris. He traced quotes in the air with his fingers. "Fun."
"Well, yeah. But they're good for posing with."
"Oh totally," said Emma. "Cigarettes are the ultimate accessory."
"Exactly," said Juan. "But I still think Fred is stupid for doing that. I understand where he's coming from, but you're still risking getting hooked on the damn things. And then eventually you've got to quit, and that's just a pain in the ass."
"It's a royal pain in the ass," corrected Emma.
"And those cigarette companies." Juan rolled his eyes. "They are evil fucking incarnate, I swear to god. I don't see how anyone can fork over so much money to them every day without wanting to just slit your own wrists."
Emma studied her noodles and did not respond.
"Present company excepted of course," Juan said quickly, noticing Emma's silence.
Emma smiled wanly and shrugged. "You try not think of stuff like that when it's you that's smoking."
"Sure," Juan agreed quickly. "Of course you do. Everybody does."
Chris felt compelled to say something to cover the momentary awkwardness. "Well, happy anniversary Emma."
"Thanks, Chris."
After the food was gone and Chris and Juan had washed the dishes (the general rule for shared meals in the house was anyone who cooked didn't have to clean up afterwards), Chris retreated to his bedroom and found himself thinking about Eric's composition. He hadn't heard from Eric since yesterday's phone call. He hoped that meant that he was busy. It was sort of tempting to call and ask him how he was doing, but Chris feared the possibility of derailing him if he was actually making progress. Eric would no doubt call him eventually, begging for more ideas for inspiration or direction.
Chris was suddenly reminded of the CD that Eric had given him when he moved out. He had left it on the shelf next to some other CDs quite a while ago, and had given it no thought since that day. Now he found that he was rather curious about it. Eric's dislike of the music had been rather strong, which in a way made it all the more mysterious.
Chris picked up the CD. "Eight Songs for a Mad King". By Peter Maxwell Davies. Text by Randolph Stow. Chris dropped the disc into his computer's CD-ROM tray and started playing it. On impulse he turned up the volume on his computer's speakers.
A second later he nearly jumped out of his skin, and the music began with a loud, shrilly discordant cadence. He reached out to turn the volume back down, but before he could do so the music had already turned quiet again. A piccolo and a clarinet were piping a single note, high and staccato, over and over. Perhaps the opening salvo was the loudest point in the music, Chris thought. It was an interesting idea, if so. He decided to leave the volume where it was for the moment. The repeated note continued, slowly increasing in volume. Now Chris could hear what sounded like a violin playing the note too, and a woodblock or something similar. The different instruments were starting to play the repeated note ever so slightly out of synch, so that the single note became more like a fuzzy cloud, something like the way an atom was supposed to look when described by quantum mechanics. The violin began playing a somber, descending glissando. It was all still relatively quiet. Chris sat down in the room's one chair and tipped it backward, staring out the window at the darkened sky.
There was a second of silence, and then a bass drum began pounding a slow pulse. Then, a sound which Chris didn't recognize at first, but then realized was the vocalist, making a low, growling noise. This was immediately followed by an extremely high-pitched and loud scream. Chris looked at his speakers. Was that really a man's voice? No, he was pretty sure there was a clarinet playing at the same time. Even so, it was impressive. The next few syllables from the vocalist were low and rasping, almost as if the man was choking, and the ends were bitten off savagely, making Chris think of a rabid animal. Now the vocalist was singing "God", the first word that Chris was able to make out, with an exaggerated vibrato. The other instruments were remaining in the background, almost as if cowed by the singer's outlandish behavior.
Chris began reading the liner notes and realized that he may not have been far off the mark with that impression. The music was meant to be a portrait of King George III during the time when he was institutionalized. The piece was almost like a short opera, in that the live performance involved several theatrical elements. The vocalist was to be wearing a king's costume. The instrumentalists were to be onstage sitting in cages. Apparently, they were meant to sometimes represent other inmates, and sometimes represent songbirds that the real King George III had owned, and supposedly had tried to teach them to sing a set of eight songs.
Meanwhile, the vocalist had kept up with the expectations set by his opening notes. The voice was constantly jumping about, from growling bass to screechy falsetto, or from quiet contemplative syllables to roaring or loud yells. The other instruments were mostly remaining in the background, occasionally coming forward with loud discordances, or sometimes imitating the vocalist's torturous sounds. The percussionist, on the other hand, seemed to be chasing the vocalist instead of the other way around — at one point there were sounds reminescent of electrical shocks as the vocalist began screaming louder and louder.
The whole thing was, Chris decided, really quite dramatic. Melodramatic, even. Which was more or less what Eric had said it was.
The music had fallen into an extremely quiet passage that Chris could barely hear when there was a knock on his door. "Chris?" It was Emma's voice.
Chris tipped his chair forward. "Come in."
Emma opened the door and peeked in curiously. "What were those funny yelling sounds?"
"Oh. Sorry about that. I was just listening to a CD."
"Really?" She stopped and listened for a moment. The music, still quiet, was playing short, nervous sequences of repeated notes, separated by pauses. "It sounded a lot different out in the hallway."
"Yeah, it's kind of a," Chris said and then paused. Having only heard a few minutes so far, he wasn't sure that he was in a position to fairly describe the whole. After a moment he finished with, "a volatile piece of music."
"Huh."
"I'm listening to it for the first time, so I don't really know what it's like overall, or even if it's any good."
"What made you buy it then?"
"Oh, I didn't buy it. Eric gave it to me." Chris thought about explaining the circumstances of Eric's giving it to him, then decided he didn't really want to get into it. The vocalist was singing something low and quiet, and Chris felt that he would prefer it if Emma left the room before he started screaming again. "I guess I had the volume up too loud. I'll switch to my headphones."
"Oh no, it wasn't loud, really; I just didn't know what it was is all. Don't worry about it."
"All right."
"I'll just leave you to it," Emma said. She was closing the door when she stopped and poked her head into the room again. "Is Eric's music going to sound like this, do you think?"
Chris blinked. "Oh, I don't think so."
"Okay. Just asking." Emma closed the door with a quiet click.
The "Eight Songs" turned out to only be about thirty minutes long. The music did in fact prove to be rather volatile, shifting not just through registers and volume levels but also styles. At one point the music inserted a quote from Handel, done in the manner of a light jazz piano bar player. This eventually gave way to something that sounded more like a hootenanny, which went on for some time before devolving into loud cacophany.
For the final song, the vocalist delivered an agitated sort of eulogy for the king, and then (according to the liner notes) ended the piece by walking off stage, all the while howling very much in the fashion of a lunatic in a melodrama.
Chris had to admit that it was an interesting bit of music. He could see that the composer had attempted to capture the sense of confusion of someone losing their mind, and the despair of someone still sensible enough to realize what's happening to them. And Chris felt that he had been partially successful in doing so, after a fashion. But at the same time he could very much see why Eric had been so turned off by it. In some ways it really did seem like it was intended to be an unflattering and exaggerated caricature of a certain type of twentieth-century classical music.
Chris removed the CD from his computer and plunked it back into its case. It was probably going to be a while before he found someone who actually wanted the CD. On the other hand, it would probably be a good source for weird samples. Chris imagined setting up Stace's computer to play one of those choking screams whenever an application crashed.
Chris stuck the CD randomly onto a shelf. To his surprise, he felt a tiny blossoming of resentment towards it. Chris had chuckled to himself at how Eric approach his possessions with such a sense of responsibility. But now, somehow, that sensibility had accompanied the CD, and Chris was beginning to feel that he had a responsibility to take Eric's charge seriously. Yes, the music was uncompelling and even abrasive. Nevertheless, somewhere out there was undoubtedly someone who would like and appreciate it. That said, however, Chris didn't really want to be the one who actually had to track down that someone. Yet he felt uncomfortable about simply shirking the whole arrangement.
How did a simple inanimate object like a CD become weighed down with such baggage?
Feeling the need for something lively, Chris idly looked across the rest of the shelf until his whimsy settled upon a Rhys Chatham collection. He cued up the CD and flopped down onto his bed. Without looking he reached under the bed and found the book he was currently reading — an O'Reilly book discussing the details of regular expressions. He flipped around for a while until he found where he had left off as the music swirled around the room.
Friday evening after leaving the office, Chris stopped by to visit Eric. Getting to Eric's new place — Alicia's old place — from the house would have taken longer on the bus, so he came over directly. The visit was partly social, partly to see how the composition was coming along. Chris tended to think of it as "the composition", since Eric got upset whenever he referred to what he was creating as "the piece", and Eric's preferred term, "work", continued to strike Chris as being just a little bit silly.
Standing before the front door and ringing the doorbell, Chris realized that this was also his first time at the house since Eric had moved in. He looked idly about the front lawn and the porch, but there were no signs here that anything was different. Well, except for Eric's car parked out front. But that was usually there anyway when Chris had visited in the past.
Alicia answered the door. "Chris, I'm glad to see you." She stepped back and pointed towards the living room. "Do something with him, will you?"
Chris stepped in, sliding out of his coat, and looked to his right. Alicia smoothly took his coat from him and hung it up on a peg by the door. "I've got to deal with dinner for a moment. I'll be right back out." Chris nodded.
Alicia's living room was small, as was the house in general, and so she had kept it sparsely furnished. A loveseat, covered in well-worn blue and green fabric sat on one side of the room. On the other side was a card table surrounded by two or three chairs. The absence of a coffee table or an end table lent the room a sense of spaciousness it hadn't earned.
That central space was now taken up by Eric, lying spread-eagle on the ground, staring straight up at the stucco ceiling.
Chris stood close by Eric's head so that he would intersect his field of vision. Looking nearly straight down, he said, "Good evening, Eric."
"Hi," Eric muttered.
"Let me guess. You wish me to understand that the composition isn't going so well."
Eric closed his eyes. "I am so. Stupid."
"Are you now," Chris said formally. He didn't want to humor Eric just yet, feeling that this display of despair was rather overdoing it, especially given that he had only been composing for three or four days.
Eric leaned his head back slightly, so that he could look Chris in the eye. "My music sucks. I mean really sucks. And why shouldn't it? I don't know what I'm doing. I mean that literally. I do not know what it is I am doing. I can't compose music. I don't know enough to even begin. Why did I think it would be easy? What a bonehead maneuver I pulled on myself."
Chris moved over to the loveseat and flopped down, letting the worn springs break his fall. He shuffled around in place for a moment, then stretched his arms along the top of the back and one armrest. "Music not coming together, is it?"
"It's not that. There's no music to come together, yet. No, it's Dale. He called me again. Wanted to meet up with me and go over my music. Wanted to know all kinds of details about it. Wanted to hear a sample of it, so he could get a feel for where it should fit in the program."
"Did you offer to whistle the main theme over the telephone for him?"
"Oh god, don't make jokes. I just can't take it."
"Well then, what did you tell him? That there was nothing to hear yet?"
"Oh, I went uhh and err, and finally I told him, gee, you know, I pulled out the work that I was planning on performing, and when I went over it I just got the feeling that it really wasn't quite as solid as I remembered it being. So I decided I really needed to rework parts of it. So because of that I don't really have anything I could play you just now, because it was all in flux, but really you shouldn't worry because the changes are really not major ones structurally, they just really effect how the music will sound in the end. But you know, maybe as soon as I had something hammered out and programmed into the computer I could play you that part of it."
Chris nodded slowly. "That's not bad for thinking on your feet. I'm impressed. I'm presuming here that you actually were on your feet at the time, of course. If you were already lying on the floor like you are now that would be thinking on your back."
"So then he asks me to just describe what it sounds like. He really wants to know what its general mood is. Why, you may ask? Turns out he's printing up the program handouts and needs to decide where to fit me in on the program. Who should I follow and who should follow me, that sort of thing. Oh yes and could I also tell him the name of the work please."
"Oh really? So what did you tell him the name was? Wait, let me guess. Was it 'Study Number Two'?"
"Ugh. No, I hate those kinds of titles. Tells you absolutely nothing. That's so frustrating when you pick up a CD of someone you've never heard of before, and you're trying to get a feel for what the music sounds like and they all have titles like 'Study Number Two' or 'Opus Forty-four'."
"So what did you give him as the title of your brilliant composition?"
Eric let out a sigh. "I told him it was called 'Screwed the Pooch'."
Chris guffawed. It popped out of his mouth before he could stop himself. "Why?"
"Because I was feeling like I just screwed the pooch with this whole thing. I guess."
"Oh man."
"And well, when people give me a blank to fill in like that, and I have no idea what to say, you know — I can't help it. My mind just automatically turns to vulgarity."
"Wow. '"Screwed the Pooch", by Eric Barnett.'"
"Printed in black and white and handed out to every member of the audience."
"What did Dale think of 'Screwed the Pooch' for a title?"
"I think he was taken aback at first. But he recovered quickly, gotta give him credit. Said that it was probably a memorable title, and maybe in the end that's really the only important thing for a title to be."
"And he's right. Well, except maybe that it also be dignified."
"I'm such a moron."
"And not announce to the world that you are brimming over with feelings of incompetence."
"Such a fucking moron."
Alicia appeared from the passageway to the dining area and leaned against the wall, arms folded. "What in hell is the origin of that phrase, anyway?"
Eric shrugged his shoulders without otherwise moving his limbs.
"I mean, it's more than just colorful. It's downright offensive."
"Yeah, that Eric, always going for the cheap shock value approach to modern art."
Eric closed his eyes.
"But seriously. What's the connection between making an honest mistake, and bestiality? Bestiality directed at a beloved household pet even?"
Chris shook his head. "You know, I really don't know."
"Come on, you're both guys. This has got to be some kind of guy thing that I'm just not privy to. That's the only explanation I can think of that makes sense."
Chris thought about that for a while, but plausible explanations continued to not suggest themselves. Finally he said, "I guess, in such situations as these, a man's mind just automatically turns to vulgarity."
Eric groaned softly.
After dinner, Eric showed Chris his new "study". It was a small second bedroom which was currently crowded with cardboard boxes. Resting atop a stack of two boxes was Eric's more expensive keyboard. A third box was placed before it to serve as a chair.
"Is this where you've been composing? Using your unpacked boxes as furniture?"
"I don't have time to unpack. I gotta work on this thing."
Chris shrugged. Chris hated unpacking after a move, so he couldn't really blame Eric for putting it off, but in Chris's case he always tried to get the unpacking over with as soon as possible. He felt that he couldn't really relax and start to settle into a new place while there were still boxes to unpack.
Eric sat down before the keyboard and pushed a few buttons. After a second or two a musical passage began to play, piano notes in a simple rhythm embellished with two points of brief syncopation, slowly rising and then quickly falling back down again in the left hand, while the right hand picked out a melodic line involving only a few closely spaced notes. After a few seconds the passage repeated. Eric let it repeat four or five times before he spoke over it. "What do you think?"
Chris nodded. "It's not bad. It's kind of bouncy, but not too bouncy."
Eric frowned and shook his head. "It's not too much of anything, really. I was actually shooting for that at first, you know. I wanted to keep my options open, so I wrote a passage that could go along with something fast and wild, or slow and somber, or happy or sad or whatever. Except of course that means I've written something absolutely generic and bordering on meaninglessness."
"Oh, it's not that bad."
"I'm starting to think now that I should start over, figure out what I want my music to say, and then write the passage."
Chris folded his arms. "No. That's absolutely the wrong approach. You were right the first time. Keep your options open, until you find out what you can say with your music. It's not important what it says. It's just got to say something. So as soon as you have music that says something — anything — you can worry about limiting your options."
Eric stared at the keyboard, and listened to the passage repeat a couple of time. "That's a good point."
"I'm actually starting to like it."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. It's actually surprisingly close to the sort of thing I had in mine when I suggested it. It sounds like something inbetween Satie and something from the Baroque era."
"You're close. It's actually something inbetween Debussy and Satie. The nice thing about their music, I realized, is that they have this tendency to play with music that doesn't have an obvious single key. They like to be ambiguous with their tonality for long stretches of time. I figured that would be a good approach for this thing, because since I'm just playing this one passage over and over, I don't want to go with a specific key and then be stuck in that key the whole time." Eric rubbed the back of his neck. "So I lifted a few ideas from both of them, more or less directly. I guess the Baroque part is what resulted when I tried to change them enough so that they sound like a complete plagiarism."
Chris nodded. They listened to the passage again for a while. Eric began miming playing on the keyboard, holding his fingers an inch above the keys.
Chris smiled. "Is that you playing it directly?"
"Are you kidding? I had to program it in one note at a time. I can't play stuff like this without fumbling every other note."
Chris listened to the passage and tried to imagine other sounds layered on top of it, building outward from it, obscuring it....
Eric shifted in his makeshift box-chair, and Chris realized that they had both been listening without talking for some time. He had lost track of how long he had been standing there, listening to the repeated passage and trying to conjure up musical ideas to accompany it. Eric reached over and silenced the keyboard.
Chris said, "I think that's going to work for you. I think I really like it."
Eric allowed a small smile to appear. "Thanks. I'm glad to hear it. But I wish I hadn't spent all week on it. I still gotta make up everything else to go along with it."
Chris grimaced. "Do you have any ideas yet?"
Eric solemly shook his head. "No."
"Nothing at all?"
"Not yet, no. Nothing at all."
Chris opened his mouth, but nothing came out for a moment. Then he said, "I can't believe you're not lying on the floor and panicking about that part, instead of moaning that you picked a stupid title."
Eric looked at his keyboard, and then let his gaze wander around the room. "Yeah. I kind of can't believe it either. I think I must be in shock, or denial or something."
"Well, do you even know what sort of sounds you want to use? Do you know anything about what you want it to sound like?"
Eric's gaze slowly returned to Chris. He took a deep breath. "I want it to sound lively and yet tranquil. Energetic, but with the energy sort of reined in, under control at all times. I want it to have repetitive elements, but always jumping back from the edge of the cliff before falling into full-blown minimalism. I want it to have some of the elements of twentieth-century experimentalism incorporated into it, like beads woven into a macrame, yet also with one or two elements of popular music peeking out from behind the curtain. I want it to have a somber middle section, no less energetic than the first part, but with a graver feel to it that counteracts the positive motion underneath it, all of which eventually grows back into a return to the lively feel of the first section, which slides into home base with a nice upbeat ending that lets the audience know without any question when to applaud."
Chris blinked. "Holy crap. What do you mean by saying you don't have any ideas? And then you go and reel off all those details? It sounds to me like you know exactly what you want it to sound like."
"All those details is what I told Dale today that it does sound like."
Chris looked at Eric. "Oh." He mulled this over for a moment. "You'd better start composing that part of it then."
"I swear, after this is over, I'm going to glue my mouth shut." Eric's face suddenly fell. "Oh crap. I have to email Dale my notes for the program tonight. What the hell am I going to say for the program notes? The music doesn't exist yet."
Chris shrugged. "Oh just say something like, 'When not composing, Eric Barnett does blah blah blah for a living. His hobbies include yada yada. "Screwed the Pooch" is his first live performance in Seattle.'"
Eric shook his head. "'First live performance in Seattle'? That's nicely misleading."
"Well, that's why I suggested it."
"Oh man. I'm going to hell, aren't I?"
Alicia's voice carried into the room. "Oh, boys? Remember who did the cooking?"
Eric stood. "Oh yeah. I guess we should go clean up."
Chris opened the front door and nearly bumped into Juan. "Whoa," he said. Juan gave him an apologetic look, but said nothing. Juan stepped to one side, and Chris finally noticed that Juan had the phone handset held to his ear. Chris closed the front door quietly.
"Yeah," Juan said. He paced slowly away from Chris, moving diagonally across the front room.
Chris walked past Juan and into the dining room. Emma was sitting at the table with her cell phone. "Yes, that's right."
"Yeah," came Juan's voice from behind Chris.
Chris was about to continue past Emma and head to his bedroom when Emma said, "Okay, thanks. Bye." She closed the cell phone. "Hey Chris. You're home awfully late."
"Yeah, I was over at Eric and Alicia's."
"How's the music coming along? Is he making any progress?"
"Yeah, he's making progress. Slow, but you know. Progress."
Juan: "Uh huh, sure but ..."
"Well, that's good," said Emma. "I'm assuming you had dinner with them?"
"Yeah, Alicia made this yummy shepherd's pie for us."
"Okay. I just ordered dinner from the Chinese place for Juan and me, so if you hadn't eaten we'd have to call them back right away and add you to the order."
Juan: "No, I understand that part."
Chris said, "You're just now getting dinner?"
"Yeah, you see ..." Emma stopped speaking, and then began again more quietly. "You see, Juan and I were hanging out talking, and we didn't notice how late it was, and then when we did we were going to make something here. Juan had this thing he wanted to try making — I think it was lasagne."
Juan: "Yeah."
"So we had just finished checking to make sure we had everything we needed when Fred called."
Chris waited for her to elaborate, but she just looked at him meaningfully. So he said, "Is there something unusual about that?"
"Juan broke up with Fred last night."
"Oh."
"Juan thought that it was totally cool and everything. Apparently Fred didn't take it personally or freak out at the time. But then he calls, and Juan's been on the phone for at least an hour now."
"Sounds like it wasn't totally cool after all."
Juan: "Uh huh. That's true."
"Yeah. I'm not exactly sure what's going on but from what I've heard on this end I think Fred is pretty upset. When he called he was just unhappy but then I think Juan said something that got him really mad, and I think since then he's just been trying to get him to calm down. For the last ten minutes he's hardly said anything. He's just been listening and going 'yeah, uh huh' every now and then."
Chris shook his head.
"So anyway, after a while I kind of got his attention and tried to ask him about dinner without actually speaking. You know." Here Emma acted out a pantomime of her attempt to communicate silently with Juan, mouthing the word "Dinner?" and shrugging her shoulder with exaggerated movements. "And so he puts his hand over the phone and whispers to me, 'Let's just order something.' And so I whispered back, 'What should I get?' And he goes, 'I don't care.' He says, 'I'm so fucking hungry I'm about ready to pass out.' So I just grabbed the first takeout menu I could find, over by the phone."
Juan: "Sure."
Chris said, "Oh yeah. We keep all of our menus in that drawer just under the junk drawer. You know the one in the living room?"
"Oh, okay."
"Yeah, I just forgot to put that one away when I used it last."
"That's fine. I hope Juan likes what I got him though. I wasn't sure what to get him so I just went with the basics."
"Yeah, I'm sure it'll be fine."
The pause in the conversation stretched out as the two of them listened to Juan slowly pacing around the living room.
Finally Chris broke the silence. "Hey Emma."
"Yo."
"Are you familiar with the phrase 'screw the pooch'?"
"Sure. It means to make a big mistake. It's military slang."
"Do you have any idea how it came about? Do you what the logic is behind it?"
"Well, it's military slang, so it's as gross as possible, you know, because the military is made up of a guys sitting around bored and trying to outdo each other. I think what I heard is, it started out with the phrase 'feed the dog', which meant to waste time fiddling around, doing nothing while trying to look busy. Somewhere along the line that gave rise to 'fuck the dog', which meant to fuck up."
"Huh. I guess I can see that."
Emma narrowed her eyes in thought. "And then I don't know if 'fuck the dog' turned into 'screw the pooch' naturally, or if Tom Wolfe made up that version when he wrote 'The Right Stuff'. It's possible he was just trying to avoid using the F word in his book. I don't know, I haven't actually read it. In any case, I'm pretty sure it's because of Tom Wolfe's book that people outside of the military learned that phrase, and so it started getting used in other places.
"Wow. Interesting. Thank you for the explanation."
"Sure. No problem. Why do you ask?"
Chris chuckled. "'Screw the Pooch' is what Eric decided to call the piece he's writing."
Emma's face assumed a pained smile. "Are you kidding?"
"I am not kidding."
"Well." Emma nodded contemplatively. "An interesting choice on his part."
"He claims that he chose it because he was feeling that he himself had screwed the pooch by agreeing to do the thing."
"Maybe he should have the piece end with the sound of an airplane crashing. That's mainly what the phrase was used for, originally."
"That's an interesting idea. You should mention it to him the next time you see him."
"I get the feeling I won't be seeing much of Eric until after the performance. But if you see him, please feel free to pass it along for me."
Chris closed his eyes and nodded. "Oh, I will."
"He just acts like a little boy sometimes," said Juan. He dropped his chopsticks onto his plate with an exasperated flourish, and then dropped the plate onto dining-room table with a clatter. "I hate trying to use these damn things. They give me writer's cramp." He stood up and walked into the kitchen. "Anybody else want a fork?"
"No thanks," said Emma. She reached for the box of kung pao chicken and filled up the empty spot on her plate.
Chris said nothing, not wanting to draw any more attention to the fact that he was mooching food than he had to. Emma had insisted that she had ordered more food than they could possibly eat because she had been so hungry when she made the order. Juan wasn't eating very much since he couldn't seem to stop talking about his conversation with Fred. Even so. Chris wasn't really hungry, but the food smelled good, and it would have seemed strangely antisocial to sit there with them and just watch them eat.
"You'd never guess from hanging out with him that he was only a couple of years younger than me," Juan said loudly from the kitchen, over a silvery rattle. "People tell me that I need to start acting my age. He makes me look like a geezer." Juan returned to the dining room with his fork and sat back down. Juan had moved his chair out at an angle from the table. He sat curled up in the chair, feet on the seat, with his plate balanced on his knees. Chris had thought he had been doing that to compensate for his fumbling use of chopsticks. Maybe he was just feeling an urge to protect himself, and responded by curling up into a fetal ball.
Emma said, "Didn't you tell me that he grew up in a small town, though? Maybe things were different there. How long has he lived in Seattle?"
Chris said, "He doesn't even live in Seattle. He's living in Bellevue."
"Six months," Juan said. "Well he grew up in Canada, so yeah I expect some things were different there."
Emma responded, "Yes, but I meant specifically things that you see as, like, him being inexperienced. You see that stuff and think he's immature but maybe he's just inexperienced."
"Winnipeg, didn't he say?" asked Chris.
Juan stabbed at his food. "Actually, from the sound of it I think it was really a suburb of Winnipeg. So it probably was a small town. I don't really see how that explains his acting childish, though."
Emma said, contemplatively, "The only thing worse than growing up in a small-town suburb, is growing up in a small town that isn't a suburb. At least if you're in the suburb there's a city to go to."
Chris said, "Oh, I could see it, Juan. You know, in a small town there's less diversity in your day-to-day life and so people aren't forced to grow up quite as fast."
Juan stared at Chris uncomprehendingly. "That makes absolutely no sense."
Emma said, "When did he come out? Maybe that has something to do with it."
Chris just shrugged. The idea had made sense to him before he had tried to put it into words, but now that he had he could no longer entirely see the shape of his original thoughts. "Well, what do I know? I've never even been to Canada."
Juan poked at the remains of the food on his plate. "I'm not really sure. He was kind of vague. His parents figured it out pretty early on and so I think he never really was in the closet with them, at least not successfully. He may have tried to be. I didn't really ask him about other people, though."
Emma looked at Chris. "You've never visited Canada? Not even for a day? It's just a few miles north, Chris."
"Well, what's in Canada that I can't get here at home?"
Juan rolled his eyes. "Have you ever heard of vacations? Travelling? Absorbing experiences in quote-unquote foreign places?"
Emma laughed. "Chris, how can you act like you know the answer to that question if you've never been there?"
Chris frowned. "By that logic, you could argue that I should go do anything that I've never done before. Maybe I should also go try heroin."
Juan said, "Don't get all defensive. This isn't debate class."
Emma shook her head. "I can't believe you're equating spending an afternoon in Canada with shooting smack."
"I'm not being defensive," Chris said, then realized that his tone of voice was bordering on the defensive. He quickly plunged ahead before they could point this out, careful to maintain a neutral and conversational pitch. "I just wanted to remind you that we all have to rely on secondhand information in order to pick and choose what we do with the limited time that we have available to us on this mortal sphere." Oh great. His attempt to be light and conversational had left him sounding pretentious. Chris focused his full attention onto the rice on his plate.
Juan put his plate down on the table, and spoke gently. "Okay, well, Chris, just so you know, if someday you ever happen to be struck with an inexplicable boredom with every single detail of your everyday environment, knoweth thou that many people find that such episodes of ennui can often be remedied by partaking of a little activity that is commonly referred to as a 'vacation'." Juan traced quote marks in the air.
Emma said, "I mean, if someone had told you that Canada was amazingly bad for your health, that would be one thing."
Chris could see that there wasn't much to be gained with the current topic of conversation. "So, Juan, are you going to get back together with Fred?"
Juan scowled at the table. "Oh, I don't know. I didn't think I would. But now I'm not so sure. I think we're going to wind up breaking up in the end no matter what, but Fred doesn't agree, and he wants me to give him a chance."
Emma said, "I say go for it. You've warned him, right? If he still wants to see it through to the bitter end, well, he can't blame you for leading him on, can he? You've been honest with him. And you do still enjoy hanging out with him, according to you. So hang out with him. He knows the score. And it might even work out. You never know."
Chris said, "I dunno. If you get back together with him now, and then after a month you really can't stand him any longer and so you call it off, but he still likes you just as much or even more ... Well, then the breakup is probably going to be ten times worse. You've only been hanging out for a few weeks so far at this point, so there's an upper limit to how much damage you can do. But the longer you stay together, the more damage a breakup can inflict."
Juan shrugged. "I just don't know any more. Sometimes I think like you Emma, and sometimes I think like Chris. You two have basically just summarized in thirty seconds my hour-long phone conversation with Fred tonight." Juan stretched out his legs and slumped in his chair, his head resting on the back of the chair. "I can't decide. I'm just going to wait and see what happens when I talk to him tomorrow. I'm hoping that when we talk in person something will happen to show me the right decision."
Emma smiled. "You mean like, a light will shine out of the heavens and show you the way?"
Chris laughed. "More like Fred will give you one of his little smiles and you'll melt in his hand."
Juan continued to stare up at the ceiling. "More like Fred will grab my ass and I'll crap in his hand."
Emma gave a short bark of laughter, then said, "'Feel me up lover!'" She and Juan both started giggling.
Chris looked from one to the other. "I think I'm definitely missing something in the way of context here."
Juan waved Chris away. "Oh, it's just, well, Fred just lacks a certain je ne sais quoi when it comes to being seductive."
Emma interjected, "Like a sense of romance for one?"
Chris asked, "So what you're saying is that he's not too accomplished at getting you into the romantic mood?"
Juan said, "Subtlety is really what he lacks. I think he got all his ideas about romance from porn."
Emma said, "Oh but Juan, I think you enjoy it more than you're willing to admit. He may be ham-handed at time, but isn't it still flattering?"
Chris said, "If a lobotomy patient tells you that he thinks you're real smart, is that still flattering?"
"It all goes back to his acting like a little boy. You'd think I was his first time or something. He needs to show some maturity if I'm going to keep dating him."
Emma nodded sympathetically. "Wait until tomorrow. See how you feel then."
Chris stood up and started collecting the plates. "Sleep on it. Maybe you'll know what to do in the morning."
Juan stared at his feet and sighed. "Right now I just want to run away. I'm tired of dealing with all this silly drama. I just want to have a nice boyfriend who doesn't exhaust me. Is that so much to ask?"
Emma grinned. "Oh, probably."
Sunday afternoon found Chris back at the Tourmaline. Given that there was now only a week left before the concert, Chris was not expecting to get a visit from Eric. Nonetheless, an hour after he had started working on his crossword puzzle, Eric walked in and dumped a backpack on the chair next to him.
"Hey Chris. Watch my stuff. I'm going to get some coffee." Eric walked back to the end of the line in front of the register, carrying a bright blue piece of paper.
After Eric had returned with his latte and had sat down, Chris set aside his puzzle and said, "I'm surprised to see you today, Eric. I would have expected you to be working feverishly on your composition."
Eric groaned. "I probably should be, but I can't. I have to put these posters up." Eric opened his backpack and started rummaging around. "Just as well. I can only stand to work on 'Screwed the Pooch' for an hour at a time. Then I have to walk away and do something else. The whole things sucks so bad I can't even tell you. I really hate it." Eric pulled out a stack of bright blue sheets of paper.
Chris pulled a poster off the top and turned it right-side up. In the bottom left-hand corner was an image of two staves of sheet music, as for a fragment of piano music, but spiraling in upon itself like a nautilus. Above this in large letters it said: "New Music by Local Composers". Below that it read: "Premiere Performances of Original Compositions by", and then, down the right-hand side, a list of five names. "Eric Barnett" appeared first.
Chris looked up. "You got top billing."
Eric smiled wryly. "The names are in alphabetical order, Chris."
"Oh." Chris looked over the poster again. "Still, it's still top billing. Are you also performing first?"
Eric winced and nodded his head.
"Oh my god. Really? Just because your last name starts with a 'B'?"
"No, I think actually it's a seniority thing. Nobody wants to be the opening act."
"Yeah. I guess not."
"So anyway, I gotta go around and get these posters put up around town by the end of the day today. Hey. Can you put up a poster at your workplace?"
"My workplace?"
"Yeah. You have bulletin boards in your office, don't you? Where people can post notices and things?"
Chris thought for a moment. "Oh yeah. I guess we do. I just never pay much attention to them. I'm used to using email for that sort of thing."
"Well, do me a favor and take a poster."
"Okay." Chris took a poster and folded in half carefully. "Yeah, I guess I've seen things like this up there before. That's a good idea." Chris tucked the poster in with his newspaper. "So, how much do you have left to compose?"
Eric gulped at his coffee and looked at Chris fearfully. "Most of it."
Chris frowned. "Okay, let me phrase it this way. Have you gotten anything down since the last time I saw you?"
"Okay." Eric put down his cup and gestured in the air between them. "I decided that on top of the repeating phrase, I'm going to have a pair of string instruments. Not real ones of course, I mean on the keyboard. Or maybe just one, but I don't think one voice will be enough to carry anything very interesting. And I decided to have the string parts playing something slow. Kind of langorous, maybe. But anyway the point is that the string parts don't need to synch up with the repeating phrase. The piano sounds will just be like a soft cloud underneath them. And I think having the main parts be slow will help to direct people's attention away from the faster-moving piano sounds, which is what I want. The last thing I want is for people to focus on the stupid minimalist part of the music."
Chris shrugged. "Okay. I'm not sure I understand what that 'soft cloud' stuff is all about, but never mind. That's cool that you're making progress."
"And so I decided that instead of just doing a loop playback from the keyboard memory, Alicia is going to play the passage live."
"Come again?"
"I asked Alicia if she would be willing to play the repeating phrase up on stage for the actual performance. And she agreed."
"I didn't even know she could play the piano."
"Well, apparently she took lessons as a kid. I don't think she's played anything like this before. But that's okay, you see, because all she has to learn is just this one short bit of music. I'm pretty sure she'll be able to play it by next week."
"She can't play it yet, I take it?"
"No. She can play through each hand separately, though the left hand she has to play really slowly. But she's got it memorized already. I think she'll get it down in plenty of time."
"Okay."
"She actually seems kind of excited by the idea. I hope she'll still be excited a week from now. Five minutes is a long time to be playing the same stupid three seconds of music over and over."
"Why did you decide to have her play it, instead of just doing it the easy way?"
"I think it'll be more interesting this way. You see, this way there'll be differences and changes. She'll speed up or slow down, without even meaning to, and occasionally she'll flub a note. It doesn't have to synchronize with the rest of it, so the string parts will be fine no matter what. That'll make it more interesting that a mechanical looping. It's more human this way."
Chris smiled. "And, of course, that way you've satisfied the requirement of having something happening live throughout the entire performance."
Eric ducked his head. His mouth twisted up as if he had been sucking on a lemon. "Actually, no, I didn't think that would really count. I mean, for the first thirty seconds yeah, but after that no. It'll be too repetitive to hold interest."
"Oh. So, what then? Are you going to play one of the string parts live?"
"Hell no. The string parts are going to be the only solidly musical part of this whole piece of shit. Those are going to be fully preprogrammed."
"So are you going to be playing something else on stage then?"
Eric nodded. "I'm going to improvise a third string part live."
Chris considered this. "Wow. I had the impression that you weren't really a fan of improvised music, Eric."
"I'm not, but what can I do? I'm up against a wall here! I'll be lucky to get something decent put together for these two string parts by next Saturday. I'm just going to turn up the volume on the preprogrammed parts and play quietly underneath them and pray that nobody starts laughing out loud."
"Eric, come on. Don't be so defeatist. Maybe it'll work out great. Maybe you'll even get the string parts written well in advance and you'll be able to work out part of the last bit ahead of time, so you won't have to totally improvise it."
Eric looked into his cup darkly. "Maybe. But it's more likely the whole thing is going to be a fucking fiasco."
"God. Try acting a little positive about this for a change. Remember what you said?"
Eric raised one eyebrow. "When?"
"The night of the concert, right after Dale made the offer to you. You said who cares if the audience hates it?"
"I did not say that. That's impossible."
"You said that the cool thing about the whole situation was that you didn't have to be a good composer. You just had to be a composer period."
Eric shook his head. "I wasn't thinking clearly at the time. I was blinded by being mistaken for a composer and was unable to see the truth of the situation. I might as well have been on drugs."
Chris willed Eric to meet his gaze. "Eric. It's going to be okay."
Eric did not look up. "Easy for you to say."
Chris threw up his head. "Okay. You're right. This whole thing is a fiasco and the audience is going to boo you right off the stage."
Eric thought about that. "Actually, getting booed off the stage would be considered something of a good outcome. There's a long and respected history of famous works getting trashed by the audience during their premiere performance. Stravinsky's 'Rite of Spring', of course, but also 'Ballet Mechanique' by George Antheil and 'Four Organs' by Steve Reich. I'm sure there are others as well."
"Well then, there you go," said Chris. "You can't lose."
"No. I can lose. A worse outcome than getting booed would be getting like three seconds of polite applause, and then everybody in the audience goes on to the next work and completely forgets everything they just heard."
Chris grimaced in sympathy. "Oh, Eric."
"And I fear that that is extremely likely."
"Well then. If that's what happens, then you don't need to worry about anything. Since everyone will have forgotten about your music, you can just shrug the whole thing off and go back to your regular life."
Eric breathed in deeply, and then let it out in a gust. "I suppose there is some consolation to be had there."
"Crumb," said a voice behind him.
Chris turned around. He had just finished tacking Eric's poster into an empty space in the bulletin board next to the elevators. Now someone Chris didn't recognize was standing behind him. He had long blonde hair that hung in stringy lanks, and there were three days' worth of beard growth on his face. He was looking past Chris at the poster on the bulletin board.
"Pardon?" said Chris cautiously.
The man's pale blue eyes flicked back to Chris and looked at him appraisingly for a moment. "That's George Crumb."
Chris adopted an expression of polite confusion. "I'm sorry? What?"
The stranger stepped forward and examined the poster more carefully. "New Music by Local Composers. Oh. So no Crumb."
Chris tried a different approach. "Hi. My name is Chris."
The watery eyes turned back onto Chris. "Hey. I'm Dell."
"Nice to meet you, Dell. So what's this Crumb thing?"
Dell turned back to the blue poster and tapped the spiraling musical notes in the corner. "This music here, this image. It's taken from George Crumb's 'Makrokosmos One'. It's the music for the final piece. When I first saw it I thought maybe this was a poster for someone performing it. But I guess it's just a decoration."
Chris nodded. "Yeah, I guess so. It is a performance, but it's all local composers performing their own music. Their names are listed there on the right." Chris tapped the list of names. "Eric Barnett's a friend of mine."
Dell looked back at Chris. "Are these people fans of George Crumb? Is their music anything like his?"
Chris wavered for a moment, then decided not to start stretching the truth. "Honestly, I don't know. I haven't heard any of the music being performed, except for a fragment of Eric's. And I'm not familiar with Crumb's music; I just recognize the name."
"Yeah, it's a funny name, and I guess that makes it easy to remember. Crumb writes music for piano and percussion and odd chamber groups. Stuff like that. He doesn't do electronic stuff. But he likes to fool around with the instruments a lot. A lot of messing around on the piano strings, and like singing into flutes, stuff like that."
"Interesting."
"His music's really dramatic. Really dark, sometimes. And sometimes just ..." Words seem to fail Dell for a moment, and he waved his left hand about. "... just transcendently beautiful."
"Wow," Chris said politely. "Sounds interesting."
"It is. It's just fascinating stuff. The Makrokosmos pieces for piano are actually for 'amplified piano'. He has a microphone placed just over the piano strings. So that lets him use a lot of special effects done by playing on the strings and stuff, which would normally be too quiet to hear. But then of course the loud stuff can get really loud. And sometimes, in certain parts, the piano player has to sing, or yell, or even whistle. He's really wild." Dell seemed to realize that he was getting carried away. "I'm a big fan of his," he finished, more quietly.
Chris maintained the polite tone. "Yeah, I can tell. Sounds like cool stuff."
"And of course he likes to make interesting shapes with his sheet music sometimes." Dell waved over his shoulder at the poster.
"Well. like I said I don't know much about the other people performing, but I guess someone else must like Crumb enough to know about his sheet music. So, maybe you should come after all." Chris shrugged to indicate that he wasn't trying to pull a hard sell on him. "I'll be going, of course."
Dell peered at the bottom of the poster. "This next Sunday? Five bucks, huh? Okay, maybe. Maybe I will."
Chris nodded and smiled encouragingly. "Maybe I'll see you there, then."
"Okay," said Dell, and abruptly continued on his way across the lobby.
The next day Chris took a break from work in the early afternoon. He looked up Dell's cubicle number in the online company directory (there was only one employee with that first name), and walked over.
Dell was sitting at his desk with headphones on. As Chris approached he looked up, smiled and pulled the headphones down around his neck. "I forgot your name," he said, by way of greeting.
Chris leaned up against the outer cubicle wall. "It's Chris."
"Hey, Chris," said Dell. "Nice to meet you again."
"Are you listening to George Crumb?" Chris asked with a smile.
"Naw," Dell shook his head. "I can't listen to his stuff at work. It's too distracting. You know? If I focus on my job, then I miss really hearing the music, and it comes to the end and I feel like I missed all of my favorite parts. But then if I focus on the music, then I end up just sitting and listening, and I stare at my computer screen and I don't get any work done."
Chris nodded. "Yeah, I kind of know what you're talking about."
"So I have a completely different set of CDs for listening to at work." Dell pointed at two stacks of CD cases sitting in the corner of his desk. "This is my more mainstream stuff. I can tune this stuff out a little bit and not feel like I'm missing out."
Chris nodded. There was a sound like a faraway church organ, which Chris realized was coming from Dell's headphones. "So what are you listening to now? Is it Bach maybe?"
"Oh." Dell reached down and hit the pause button on his CD player. "No, this is Miss Murgatroid."
"Miss Murgatroid?"
"Yeah. Ever heard of her before?"
"Nope."
"She's cool. She plays, like, goth accordion music."
"Goth accordion music?"
"Yeah. Some of it's pretty funny. And some of it's kinda annoying in places. For that stuff you sort of have to be in the mood."
"And this is your more mainstream stuff."
Dell gestured vaguely. "Oh, well, you know. I also listen to stuff like Sonic Youth sometimes."
"Okay. Anyway, Dell." Chris stood up straight, and reached into a pocket inside his jacket. "I was thinking about your description of George Crumb's music last night, and it occurred to me that some of it was rather reminescent of this music, too." Chris pulled out handed Dell a CD.
Dell took it and examined the front. "'Eight Songs for a Mad King'."
"Yeah. Are you familiar with it?"
"No, never heard of it."
"Well, the music is quite dramatic. I thought you might like it."
"Are you loaning it to me to listen to?"
"Yes I am, but actually there's more." Chris leaned back against the cubicle wall. "Go ahead and borrow it and listen to it. If you don't like it, give it back to me, no problem. But if you do like it, then you can have it. In exchange for it, you just need to give me a CD that you already own but you don't like and want to get rid of."
Dell's eyes narrowed. "I don't get it. Is there a catch I'm missing?"
"I'm not trying to scam you or anything, honest. Just, the way you were talking about George Crumb made me think of this CD."
"And you don't want it anymore?"
"Actually, it's not even mine really. It belongs to my friend Eric. You know, the one who's performing on Sunday. He asked me to, basically, find a home for it. Find someone who might appreciate it. And exchange it for another CD that needs to find a home."
Dell turned the CD over and looked at the back. "Okay. Well, thanks I guess. I'll take it home and listen to it tonight. I'll let you know what I think."
"No hurry." Chris thought about mentioning that Eric wouldn't really care if Dell just kept the CD forever, but decided that it was a better story the way it was.
"Okay." Dell put his headphones back over his ears and returned his attention to his computer.
Chris smiled at the back of Dell's head and went off to find lunch somewhere nearby. Dell seemed to be a bit lacking in social graces, but that was okay. Chris wasn't the most socially adept person either. At least he had made an initial effort to find a home for that CD of Eric's.
Ring.
Ring.
"Hello?"
"Eric!"
"Oh, hi Chris."
"Eric, it's Friday. I haven't heard a thing from you all week long."
"Well, I've been busy, you know."
"Well, I realize that. But I'm freaking out over here without any news."
"Wait a minute. It is Friday. Shouldn't you be at work?"
"I am at work. You're the one who should be at work but isn't."
"I took another sick day. Obviously. Why are you calling me from work? Shouldn't you be working?"
"I can't concentrate on my code any more. I need to know what's going on. All I can think about is you, Eric. So how's it coming?"
"How's it coming? You mean the Pooch?"
"Of course I mean the Pooch. What else would I mean?"
"Well, the composed parts of 'Screwed the Pooch' are basically finished. I pretty much had to have it ready to go by yesterday evening, so that Dale could hear it and we could do the tech rehearsals and all that."
"Oh really? How'd that go?"
"Oh boy. I spent so much time yesterday sitting around waiting. Let me tell you, don't ever agree to do a concert with a bunch of different musicians, all of them doing something different. It's total chaos. Every person you add to the concert squares the amount of tech work needed to get it ready. All the wiring and cabling has to be worked out ahead of time and shit."
"Actually, Eric, I was asking how it went when you played your music for Dale."
"Oh, that. I don't think it went over all that great. I mean Dale was polite and all, but I'm sure he noticed that it didn't really sound the way I described it sounding to him last week. He didn't really say anything, but I got the impression that he was thought it was pretty uninteresting. And it is. It is the epitome of derivative and uninspired, in fact. It doesn't even have the guts to be obnoxious in that twentieth century classical way. It's just vaguely dissonant for a while, and then it's vaguely consonant for a while, and I would say that I hate it except that I don't really because I'm past caring about it that much one way or another. The music sucks, but who cares? Not me at this point. I can't work up the energy to care. I'm just waiting for this whole thing to be over with at which point I will hopefully be able to get my life back. I wish I hadn't told Dale that I was going to improvise over it. Otherwise I could have just turned the key volume all the way down, played back the recorded parts and just pretended to be playing something live. That would have been just fine and who would have cared one iota more? Nobody. I'll know better next time, except that there won't be a next time."
"Eric! Will you lighten up on yourself? I'm drowning under the tsunami of ambivalence and self-loathing that's coming out of the telephone."
"You're drowning? I went under for the third time several days ago. Probably the only reason I was able to get anything composed. Back when I still cared whether or not it sucked, I kept throwing away everything I wrote. Because it sucked. But then finally I stopped caring. Then I wrote something, and I kept it. That's what I'm playing."
"Okay okay. Give it a rest. Crap. Nihilism central here."
"Okay. What else did you want to ask me? Or is that all you called about?"
"I suppose it was. Hey, are you going to be okay with it if I attend this concert? or will you get upset if anybody actually hears this hideous music of yours?"
"God no I won't get upset. A bunch of people have already heard the recorded parts already. It's too late for being upset. My reputation is already shit. No, of course I still want you to show up. I want everyone to show up. We can go get drunk afterwards to help us forget the whole thing ever happened."
"Okay. I'm guessing from the sound of things that I'm not going see you till then?"
"I don't think so. I have to come in two hours before the show starts and get all my stuff set up. I plan to spend the rest of my weekend between now and then working on the improv part. Maybe I can get something written down ahead of time so it won't be stupid all the way through."
"How's Alicia coming along with her piano playing, by the way?"
"She's doing all right. She can play the passage pretty well now. Almost too well, in fact, since the whole point was for her to make mistakes occasionally. She might have to start playing it a little faster than she is now, depending on how it goes."
"Is she still looking forward to it? Or is she all defeatist like you?"
"I'm not being defeatist. I'm just being rational."
"Okay, is she all rationalist like you?"
"Well, no, is the answer to your question. In fact if anything she's starting to get excited about being up on stage. I don't really understand it."
"I do, Eric. I'm rather excited myself."
"I guess it's easier for you folks to enjoy. You're not the ones who have to take responsibility for actually creating the tedious music."
"Okay, Eric. This has been a pleasant little chat and all, and I think I'm going to hang up now."
"Don't blame you."
"Thanks for the update. And I guess I'll see you on Sunday."
"No doubt you will."
"Okay. Bye now."
"Bye."
Chris turned off the power to his computer monitor with a snap. It was the end of the Friday workday, and time to go home.
"Hey Chris."
Chris turned around. Dell was standing in front of his cubicle.
"Oh hey, Dell. How's it going?"
"It's going good. You?"
"Oh, sure. Just getting ready to head out. What's up?"
In response Dell offered Chris a CD he had been carrying in his left hand.
Chris took the CD. "Kronos Quartet: Black Angels" said the front cover. At first Chris didn't make the connection. He looked up at Dell and said, "Yes?"
Dell nodded once. "That's my CD in trade that I own but I don't like."
Light dawned. "Oh!" Chris looked at the CD once more. "So does that mean you decided you want to keep the CD I gave you?"
"Yeah. That CD is something else, man. I listened to it once, the night after you gave it to me, you know, and I really didn't much like it. I thought it was just — trying too hard, like?"
Chris nodded. "Sure, I think I know what you mean."
"But I forgot to take it out of my CD player, so I came to work the next day and I had the case but not the CD. So I couldn't give it back to you that day. On the bus ride home I wound up reading the liner notes through again, and they just — made it sound interesting. So I decided to listen to it a second time, figured what the hell. And there were one or two bits that I actually kind of liked that time."
Chris leaned up against his desk. "Oh yeah?"
"Yeah. And, well, you know, if there one thing I've learned, it's that the music that I wind up liking the most, the stuff that I keep turning back to over and over again, is almost always stuff that I don't like the first time I hear it."
Chris blinked. "Really. So if you hate something the first time, do you always go back and listen to it again?"
Dell laughed drily, the closest Chris had seen him come to a smile. "Heck no. That's the thing, it doesn't work both ways. Most stuff I hate the first time, I hate the second, and the third time. You just never know. You still have to follow your instincts, you just learn not to trust them one hundred percent of the time."
"Huh."
"So anyway, I've listened to the CD about five or ten times now, and I'm starting to really like it. It's like an incredibly intense picture of what it would be like to actually be going insane while locked up somewhere."
"Yeah, I can kind of see that. So this is a CD of yours you wanted to get rid of?"
"Oh yeah. I should've sold that CD years ago, but I couldn't quite bring myself to do so. I've never really liked the Kronos Quartet. They're so superficial-acting, you know what I mean? You'd swear they spend more time on picking out their costumes than anything else."
"Really?" Chris interjected. "I've heard that they're extremely skillful players."
"Yeah, I think that's probably true. But I also think they're completely focused on the technical side of things. They're all left brain and no right brain. But see, here's the irony of it." Dell tapped the CD cover in Chris's hand. "'Black Angels' is the name of a string quartet composed by George Crumb. It's insanely dramatic, and full of contrasts. And it also requires lots of difficult playing techniques. The funny thing is that this is the piece of music that inspired the creation of the Kronos Quartet."
"Oh really?"
"Yeah. One of them heard someone performing it on the radio one day, and got all fired up, and organized their own string quartet, specifically so they could focus on playing music written by modern composers, like George Crumb. And of course I'm all for that. We need more people doing stuff like that, you know? Modern composers don't get a fraction of the exposure they ought to have."
"A drop in the bucket next to the rest of classical music."
"Even tinier when you compare it with the pop shit they play on the radio. So I mean it's great that the Kronos Quartet have made George Crumb 'hip' and all, but he's not meant to be this 'hip' flavor of the month. He's meant to be taken seriously. Very seriously."
Chris felt that the repetition was unnecessary. It was quite clear already that Dell took George Crumb very seriously.
"So but, even though 'Black Angels' was kind of how they got started, they actually waited several years before they finally put out a CD that included 'Black Angels' on it. And so even though I didn't like some things about the Kronos Quartet, of course I had to check it out. So I bought that CD."
"And I'm guessing you didn't like it."
"They ..." Dell shook his head while his mouth moved silently. "They fucking laid waste to that piece, man. They play it way too fast, I mean way too fast, because they're so focused on showing off I guess. And they add all these studio effects on top of everything, that aren't in the original music. It's like, where'd that come from? And like in the last movement, there's this bit, see, where they run their fingers up and down the strings tapping them while they're wearing thimbles? And at the same time they're still fingering the notes from an earlier movement? So you get this insectoid chittering sound, but simultaneously you get this ghostly echo of the other music on top of it. But the Kronos Quartet ..."
Chris could tell that Dell was really winding himself up, so he interjected. "Dell, sorry to interrupt, seriously, but I gotta run or else I'm gonna be late."
"Oh. Sorry." Dell stuck his hands in his pockets, and appeared to rapidly deflate.
Chris stuffed the CD into a pocket in his jacket. "No, I'm sorry for running out on you. I just can't be late, you know. But it's great that you decided to trade CDs. I will definitely give this to Eric when I see him this weekend."
"Cool."
"Oh hey, so are you going to come to the concert on Sunday?"
Dell shrugged. "No, probably not. I got other stuff to do. And you know. No offense, but, if this Eric guy didn't like 'Eight Songs for a Mad King', then I figure there's a pretty good chance I won't like his music. Tell him I said hi though, and thanks for the CD. Hope he likes the Kronos Quartet stuff more than I did."
The performance space turned out to be a room with walls painted black. The stage was just a large dais about six inches high, and the seating consisted of metal folding chairs set out in rows. Dale's other show was starting to look pretty classy in comparison, Chris thought. There were probably no more than a dozen people in the audience, but on the other hand it was still early. Hopefully more would show up.
Eric and Alicia were both on stage, setting up the two keyboards. Eric was wearing a white shirt with a tie. Alicia was wearing a deep blue blouse and a long black skirt. They appeared to have just completed a minimal sound check. Eric looked over at Alicia and shrugged.
Chris cupped his hands around his mouth. "Eric, over here."
Eric and Alicia spotted Chris at his seat and walked over to him.
Chris smiled. "You two certainly look nice tonight."
Eric looked a bit uncomfortable. "Yeah, Alicia talked me into it. I was going to wear my usual clothes, but then I figured it would look sort of stupid if she was dressed up and I was in jeans and a tee shirt. So —" Eric completed his sentence by grabbing his tie and waving the tail end.
Chris gestured at the chairs to his right. "Sit down. I'm saving these for the others."
Eric took the seat next to Chris. "How many are coming?"
"Emma and Juan are both coming for sure. I never got a clear answer from Juan if Fred would be joining him. I think they're back together, but I don't know for sure." Chris paused. "I don't even know for sure if they know."
Eric shook his head. "I'm so freaking bored." Apparently he was having a hard time thinking about other people's problems. "I think my cover is blown, basically. All the other composers are just kind of looking down on me. Everybody kind of acts like I'm always getting in their way, because I don't know what I'm doing because I'm not a real composer like they all are. So they just ignore me a lot."
Chris frowned. "Sure you're just not being paranoid?"
Alicia leaned forward. "He is being paranoid, but it's true that they are snubbing him a bit."
Eric muttered, "Dale probably called a secret meeting and told them that my piece sucks rocks."
Alicia smirked. "His paranoia is usually more understated than this, actually."
Chris put a hand on Eric's shoulder. "Just keep telling yourself: in a few minutes, it will all be over."
"That's been my mantra since I woke up this morning, Chris."
Alicia threw up her hands. "I really wish you would just admit that this is still a pretty cool thing we're doing. I'm psyched to do this, and I'm going to be sitting under a bunch of bright lights playing the same twenty-two notes over and over for five minutes. If I can look forward to doing this, so can you."
Eric kept his gaze focused on the stage, where a couple of techs were adjusting the stage lighting. "To look forward to doing this I'd need a lobotomy."
Alicia rolled her eyes but said nothing. There was an awkward pause, which Chris finally broke. "Hey, look who just arrived." He pointed towards the door.
Juan and Fred walked over. "Hey, man," Fred said, leaning forward to grin at Eric. "Told you I wouldn't miss it."
Eric plastered a fake-looking smile across his face. "Good evening, Fred! Glad you could make it!"
Juan appeared next to Fred, also with a mischievious grin. "I got eggs, but I forgot to bring any tomatoes. Did anyone bring rotten tomatoes?"
Eric blared his smile at Juan. "Good evening, Juan! Glad you could make it!"
Fred's grin shifted slightly to one side. "Are you feeling okay Eric? You're acting like you've got a bit of stage fright. Do you think you might throw up on stage? If so, maybe you should tell everyone that you're doing performance art instead, and pass it off as part of the show."
Emma walked up, standing next to Juan. She was dressed once again in her black gown. "Eric! Aren't you excited? It's showtime!"
Alicia snorted. "Oh he's excited all right."
Fred said, "You know what the great thing about performance art is? You can get up on stage and do absolutely anything." Fred held out his hands to show just how much you were allowed to do. "Absolutely anything, and no one can complain. Because you warned them beforehand, it's performance art. You can spend two hours insulting everyone in the audience, you can throw food at them, spray them with perfume, anything at all. And when they walk out of the theater crying with rancid gravy in their hair and reeking of orchids, they have no one to blame but themselves. Becuase you told them. It's performance art, baby. That's what you should do tonight. Forget this stupid music stuff."
Eric laid a heavy hand upon Fred's shoulder. "Fred, that's a wonderful idea, but it's about a week late. So sit down and shut up." Eric stood up. "It's time I retired to the kitchen space that passes as the offstage area here. So if you'll all excuse me." Eric made a brief bow and walked away.
Alicia stood up, her compressed lips betraying her annoyance. "Don't mind him. He'll be back to his normal self once this is over, I'm sure. Thank you all for coming. See you after the show." She waved briefly and then walked away.
The concert was due to start at any time, but the room's lights were still on. Chris looked around. There were probably no more than thirty people present, all told. He turned to Emma, sitting next to him. "So. You got all dressed up for Eric's performance."
"Well, yeah. It's a special occasion, don't you think? I thought it would be appropriate."
Chris wondered briefly if Eric had been expecting Chris to dress up for the occasion as well. Did he consider the fact that he was in casual clothes an indication of a lack of support? No, Eric knew Chris well enough to know that wasn't true. In any case, Chris strongly suspected that Eric was currently beyond caring about such things. "Isn't that the same dress you wore for that other concert?"
"Yeah. It's the only really formal dress I own. I do have this really nice red dress, but it's got this stain on the left sleeve."
"Does it still smell like cigarettes?"
"A bit. Nowhere near as bad as it did, though."
"You know, Emma, the only other time Dale's seen you is in that dress."
Emma shrugged. "Yeah, that's true. Big deal."
Juan, sitting on the other side of Emma, leaned forward to catch Chris's eye. "Hey Chris, have you heard this thing yet? Is it any good?"
Chris shook his head. "Hardly at all. Just this one bit that repeats."
"Is it going to be plink-plonk-bing-bang music?"
Chris smiled. "No. I'm pretty sure it won't be like that."
Fred, on the other side of Juan, leaned forward, his grin still firmly in place. "Hey, who will give me five bucks to start booing in the middle of Eric's performance?"
Juan gave Fred a light shove. "Act your age, Fred."
The house lights went dim. There was scattered applause from the audience as the stage lights brightened. Dale Masterson walked up onto the stage and began speaking, loudly enough to be heard in the back row. "Good evening, everybody. Thanks so much for coming out tonight. We all really appreciate it. We've got a great little collection of new music for you to hear, all of it written by local composers here in Seattle, and all of it being performed for the very first time." More scattered applause. "I'm sure you'd all like me to sit down and shut up so we can get the music started, so I'm going to keep this short. I just want to point out a small correction for the program notes." Dale consulted a copy of the program he was carrying in his left hand. "The first selection, 'Screwed the Pooch' by Eric Barnett —" Dale paused, and a few members of the audience dutifully chuckled. "— the first selection lists Eric Barnett as playing keyboard, with a prerecorded accompaniament. What's missing there is that Eric will be joined by Alicia Kent, also playing keyboard." Dale looked back up at the audience and smiled. "Okay. So, without further ado: Eric and Alicia."
The audience applauded as Dale stepped down from the stage, and Eric and Alicia emerged from the darkness and took their places on either side of the stage, sitting in metal folding chairs identical to those in the audience, each in front of one of Eric's keyboards.
Eric looked across the stage at Alicia and motioned to her, a gesture that said "ready when you are". Alicia took a deep breath and closed her eyes for a moment, hands poised over the keys. Then she opened her eyes and dove into the repeating piano notes.
Chris nodded to himself. The passage sounded pretty much as he remembered it, maybe a little slower than when Eric had played it for him. Alicia looked calm and focused, clearly conserving her energy for the minutes ahead.
Eric watched her from his side of the stage without moving for ten or twelve repetitions of the passage. Then he reached out and touched a few buttons on the upper half of his keyboard. Chris could see him slowly turning a knob on the far left side as a pair of held violin notes grew into audibility and eventually matched the volume level of Alicia's playing.
Eric remained motionless as the two violin notes changed from a perfect fifth to a major third, and then, after one or two repeats of Alicia's passage, to a minor third. Chris could see where some of Eric's dissatisfaction came from. The violin parts were too slow-moving — presumably necessary to make the piece last for the requisite five minutes, but more movement, more drive, would be needed to rescue the piece from the minimalist label.
Eric seemed to reach the same conclusion, as he slowly moved his hands from the buttons to the keyboard. But still he let his hands rest lightly atop the keys, without playing anything. His expression was tense and he seemed to be working up the necessary resolve to actually depress the white and black keys in front of him. The violins continued to slowly shift from interval to interval. Alicia was now playing with her eyes closed, rhythm as steady as when she started.
Finally Eric pursed his lips and leaned forward. The sound of a flute trio joined the other instruments, plodding across the treble clef in parallel fourths, moving in and out of dissonance with the violins.
The music was enjoyable enough, Chris thought. He could understand why Eric was so dissatisfied, and maybe he would feel the same way if it had been him up there on the stage. Still, he couldn't help think that there was really nothing wrong with it as it was.
The flutes suddenly fell silent. Eric punched a couple of buttons, and the next chord he played on the keys had the timbre of oboes. A good choice, Chris thought. Flutes could be pretty, but they lacked the somber bite of the other woodwinds.
After a while, though, Eric seemed to be finished with the oboes as well. He stabbed at the buttons again, and the violins abruptly went silent. Eric froze in place as Alicia's repeated passage continued without accompaniament.
"Oh shit," Chris whispered involuntarily. He remembered a day, right after Eric had purchased that keyboard, when he and Eric had been experimenting with its various features. He and Eric, curious about its editing features, had tediously programmed in every single note of a short Bach fugue. They had been listening to the playback, listening for the various notes they had placed incorrectly, and Eric had tried to do something — Chris could no longer remember what. But he had pressed the wrong button, or buttons, and had deleted the fugue that they had so laboriously entered.
Emma glanced at Chris. "Is something wrong?" she asked quietly.
Up on stage, Alicia was glaring at Eric wide-eyed. Eric meanwhile was looking down his keyboard with his left hand over his mouth. Chris replied, "I think Eric just screwed the pooch."
Eric suddenly took his hand from his mouth. His face froze into an expression of concentration. Alicia was giving him a questioning look, as if trying to interrogate him via telepathy.
Emma looked back at Chris. "What do you mean? What happened?"
Eric sat unmoving for another moment, and then he seemed to snap out of something. He reached over to the far left of his keyboard and punched at the buttons. There was a loud click from the speakers, and Eric winced briefly. Then his fingers were at the keys again, and the sound of two violins holding a perfect fifth returned. Eric's fingers moved, and the violins changed to a minor third.
Chris nodded. "He's winging it."
Eric glared at his hands, as if willing them to recall the music he had just erased.
Emma leaned back in her seat and whispered, "Why? Did he screw up his something on his keyboard?"
"Basically, yes."
"Oops."
Over the next minute Eric picked out a sequence of notes that vaguely resembled the violin parts that had played earlier. Chris could tell that it was not the same, though — Eric was going too fast, and at one or two points he had skipped over several notes. Eric was now holding his face only a few inches above the keyboard. Alicia had returned to her calm exterior, playing her unwavering passage with eyes closed. The violins were now playing a perfect fifth again, and Eric seemed to be unsure of what to do next.
After holding the notes for a while longer he stretched a finger out to a black key. The key slipped out from under his finger, causing him to land on the white key next to it, and for a moment the biting dissonance of a minor second shrilled out. Eric yanked his hands away from the keys, as if they were hot. Chris winced in sympathetic embarrassment. Eric now had his hands over his face, as if he were trying to forget that the outside world existed. Alicia was once again staring at him, looking for some indication from him of what to do next.
Suddenly Eric pulled his hands from his face and slammed them both onto the keys of his keyboard. A massive tone cluster came blasting from the speakers. Alicia visibly jumped. Eric began moving his hands independently up and down the length of the keys, slapping huge stacks of dissonant seconds to life. His facial expression suggested that he fully intended to smash his keyboard into submission with his bare hands. After a moment, Eric seemed to tire of using his open palms, for he began banging against the keys with clenched fists, both of them alternating, creating a squeaking trill in the high register. He then began letting the trill travel up and down the range of a octave or two. To Chris's eyes it looked as if Eric was trying to give his keyboard a Swedish massage.
Without taking her eyes off the stage Emma leaned back and said, loudly enough to be heard over the noise, "He's still winging it, isn't he?"
Now Eric was hitting the keys repeatedly with his entire left forearm, producing a creaky wall of loud bass notes, thundering out again and again. Apparently unsatisfied with this, he began including his right forearm. The noise was quite loud now, and sounded like an entire string orchestra, all playing different notes. Eric continued to bang the keys in a slow, pulsing rhythm, meanwhile moving his forearms apart so that they reached the extremes on either end, once again leaning over with his face only inches above the keys. Eric then began using his forehead to hit the middle keys that were escaping his reach. Slamming the entire breadth of the keyboard over and over, the sound almost unrecognizable anymore as synthesized strings. Chris looked over and saw that Alicia had gone red in the face from the exertion of trying desperately not to burst out laughing.
Suddenly Eric sat up straight and held still. The noise stopped, and into the silence awareness slowly returned of Alicia's calmly repeating piano notes. Eric seemed to be catching his breath. Then, after a pause, he reached out and played two violin notes, once again a perfect fifth apart. Without lingering over the notes, he once again picked out a sequence from the part that had played at the beginning, or something close to it anyway. When the violins had plodded back to playing a fifth again, Eric released the keys and violently drew an outstretched finger across his Adam's apple while looking pointedly at Alicia. Alicia nodded back to Eric, played to the end of the current repetition, and stopped, a huge sigh escaping from her open mouth. Eric immediately jumped to feet and faced the audience, as if eager to reassure them that the piece was indeed over. Alicia stood up, and the two of them bowed as the audience applauded.
A piercing whistle of approval came from Chris's left. He looked over, surprised, and saw that Fred was standing up. "Yeah!" he shouted, applauding all the while. But Eric was already striding off the stage as quickly as he could, with Alicia close on his heels. After a moment or two Fred realized that the standing ovation was a lost cause and sat down again. As Dale walked back onto the stage and the applause petered out, Fred turned to the others and said, "That was fucking hilarious!"
"Okay, we're now going to take a short break here, ten minutes or so. Feel free to get up and stretch your legs. There should be enough time to have a cigarette, so if you're so inclined there's a designated smoking section on the east side of the building." Dale smiled out at the audience, and then stepped off the stage as the room's lights were turned back up.
Chris and the others headed over to the door through which the performers entered and exited, in search of Eric and Alicia. They found them in a crowded kitchenette along with the other performers and other people that Chris assumed were stagehands of some kind.
"Eric!"
Eric looked utterly drained. His face was pale and his arms hung loosely at his sides like a rag doll. "Hey Chris. Hey everybody. Uh. Thanks for showing up."
"So what happened, Eric? You accidentally erased the playback memory, didn't you?"
"Yes I accidentally erased the playback memory. I hope you didn't think that hideous performance up there was planned."
Emma scoffed. "Oh! It wasn't hideous, Eric."
Fred interrupted. "It was totally awesome! Oh my god. That was the greatest. You know what my favorite part was?" Chris noticed Juan was standing slightly behind Fred and silently chuckling. "It was when you starting playing the keyboard with your face. I just about died I was laughing so hard."
Alicia nodded her head. "That was pretty damn funny all right."
"Man, I heard that first part, and I thought the whole thing was going to be like that, you know just slow and quiet all the way through. And then you just like slapped the keyboard —" Fred mimed the action. "— and bang!"
Eric winced. "It was hideous. It was a lot of meaningless noise that I made because I can't actually play the keyboard." Eric ran a hand heavily through his hair, leaving it pointing behind him. "My choices were limited. Either do that, or play a Bach prelude, and I didn't think I would be able to remember the Bach prelude all the way through."
Fred goggled at Eric.
"Hey there, you guys." Chris turned around. Dale was there, trying to squeeze by him. He stepped to one side to let him pass. "Hey Chris. Hey Emma. Good to see you again. Glad you could make it tonight. Hey Alicia. Congratulations. Excellent job. So Eric, tell me, I only got a minute here but I'm just real curious to know what happened."
Eric put a hand to his forehead, partially obscuring one eye. "Oh, well, the simple truth is that I accidentally hit the wrong button, and erased all the preprogrammed tracks in the middle of the playback. So I tried to do it from memory, but I couldn't remember it well enough. So I ..." Eric trailed off and shrugged his shoulders. "I had to do something, and I couldn't think of anything else to do."
Dale nodded to indicate sympathy. "Ouch. Ouch. Wow. Well, I'm really sorry you didn't get to play the music you wanted to. But hey, congratulations on keeping a cool head. You did a great job of thinking on your feet."
Fred said, "So, that really wasn't how it was supposed to sound? You were honestly freaking out up there?"
Eric closed his eyes as if the world was suddenly too much to bear. "Yes, Fred, that was the sound of me panicking."
Fred started laughing. "No way."
Dale said, "Don't feel bad, Eric. I'm serious; you did a great job. You know, in a lot of ways what you actually played up there made a better opener for the concert than the original."
Alicia smiled. "That's exactly what I was telling him. And what he played was far more appropriate for the title of the piece."
Dale laughed a deep, chummy laugh. "Oh, absolutely. Absolutely."
Eric groaned. "That'll teach me to never use such titles. The next piece I write will be named 'Performed Flawlessly'."
Dale smiled and punched Eric lightly on the shoulder. "Anyway, I gotta get run back out there, but I just wanted to hear the whole story. And let you know that I appreciate that you didn't just freeze up, up there, when things went wrong. I like it that you hung in and did your best to salvage the situation. That's the mark of a professional."
Eric looked at Dale weakly, and suddenly a look of naked gratitude washed over him. "Thanks, Dale."
"Thank you, Eric. Okay. Gotta go get ready for my performance." Dale turned to leave. "You guys aren't gonna take off, are you? You're all sticking around for the second half, right?"
Fred said, "Actually, I'm kinda ready to go."
Juan glared at Fred balefully. "Of course we're staying for the whole concert."
Chris turned back to Eric and Alicia. "You know, there's a bunch of empty chairs right behind us. You want to come out and join us?"
Eric considered. "Yeah, I'd kinda like to hear Dale's work again. Maybe I can actually appreciate it this time." He stood up and loosened his tie. "Now that I'm free."
Eric had to stay for some time after the concert was over, to help clean up and to get his keyboards safely home again. So Chris and the others had returned home, to wait for Eric and Alicia to join them afterwards.
The four of them were sitting around the living room. Juan and Fred had crammed themselves into the easy chair, Fred half sitting on Juan's lap, while Emma and Chris took the couch.
On the coffee table was an open bottle of red wine. Chris had decided that they should have something to celebrate with, despite the fact that it was Sunday. So they had walked over to the neighborhood grocery store. Juan and Emma had picked it out; it had a long French name that Chris had already forgotten.
"So what happened to Eric, exactly?" asked Fred.
"He hit the wrong button on his keyboard," explained Chris, "and it erased all the music he had stored there last week. You know, the part with the violins."
"Okay. So then what? Was he trying to play something else?"
"Well, I think he first tried to play the stuff he erased, you know play it himself, from memory, but he wasn't able to pull it off. So he just started bashing the keys because he couldn't think of anything else to do."
"He was just making all that up as he went, right?"
"Yeah, I don't think he was playing something he had composed earlier."
Fred shook his head. "Too funny, man. Too fucking funny."
Emma put down her glass and stood up. "I'm going to go change into something more casual."
"Definitely worth five bucks."
Chris pulled in his legs to let Emma pass.
Juan said, "Fred, I think it's great that you showed Eric such enthusiasm for his performance. But maybe you should ease off on him a little bit now. He may not want to be continually reminded that he basically fucked up in front of an audience."
"What, Juan? You want me to frown at him? Should I say, 'hey man, sorry your music was so hilarous'?"
Juan rolled his eyes. "No, Fred, I just said I was glad you gave him all those compliments."
"Well, he deserved every one of them."
"I'm just saying don't keep bringing up all those details. Like you said yourself, he really was freaking out up on stage."
"Man. It was like watching a reality TV show. Only shorter. It was like reality TV as musical performance. That could be a whole new genre of music."
There was a knock at the door. "Come in!" yelled Juan before Chris could get up.
The door opened, and Eric and Alicia walked in. They were still dressed in their stage clothes, although Eric had pulled the knot of his tie down another inch and Alicia had unbuttoned the topmost button on her blouse.
Eric said, "Oh look, Alicia, they're drinking already."
Juan said, "Hello, Eric, Alicia. Congratulations. Help yourself to some wine. It's really good."
Eric said, "Hang on, I'll get a couple of chairs from the dining room."
Alicia said, "Ooh, it's tempting, but Eric and I have already had half a glass of cheap champagne. Dale opened up a bottle after we had finished putting everything away, and made everyone have some. Apparently he always does this after a performance."
Chris said, "Well, Eric's the one who's driving, right? So you can still have some wine." Chris leaned forward and grabbed a clean glass in one hand and the bottle in the other. "And Eric can have a couple of sips. He'll be fine. Hell, I've driven with Eric after he's had a lot more to drink than that."
Alicia squeezed her eyes closed and put her fingers in her ears. "La la la la! I can't hear you!"
Eric returned with a chair under each arm. "What's that?"
Alicia laughed and accepted a chair from Eric. "Nothing."
Emma reappeared, back in her usual jeans and flannel shirt. "Hey there. You folks made it."
Chris stood up and handed Alicia half a glass of wine. "So. You did it."
Eric fell into his chair. "Yes. It is finally over."
Alicia cheered.
Chris sat back down and grabbed the remaining glass on the table. "And it sounds like it actually went okay, despite everything." He poured an inch of wine into the glass.
"Despite everything." Eric leaned forward and accepted the glass from Chris.
"In fact, Dale didn't seem upset at all about your performance."
"Upset?" Eric shook his head. "Good god, I swear to you he preferred it over the original. He was so ambivalent about it when I played it for him earlier. And I told you how I thought he and the others were snubbing me before the show started, right? Well after the show, they came up to us and wanted to know what had happened, and they commiserated with me, and they all had stories of their own to tell, of screwing up on stage.
Alicia nodded. "For a while we were all just in a circle swapping horror stories. Just like that they were treating us like we were old pals."
"And folks would congratulate me for sticking it out, and trying to make the best of the situation. Crap, I hate to say this, but I think that pressing that button and blowing everything away in the middle of the show was the best thing that could have happened."
Chris smiled. "Well, in that case, allow me to propose a toast." Chris stood up and raised his glass. "To Eric's butter fingers!"
Everyone raised their glass and repeated "To Eric's butter fingers," except for Fred who appended, "And his broad forehead!"
"Hey, Eric." Chris put his glass down and walked over to the front door. "I have something for you." Chris found his coat hanging on its peg and rummaged through an inner pocket.
Juan said, "Hey Eric. Since you made such a good impression on everyone, do you think you'll be doing more performances in the future?"
Eric rested his glass on his knee and looked wide-eyed at Juan. "You know, maybe I will. Who knows?"
Alicia barked a laugh. "Eric, for the last week you've been pissing and moaning, I will never do this again, I can't believe I ever agreed to do this, oh my god what have I done to myself."
Eric shrugged. "Yeah but, didn't you think it was pretty cool when it was over and everyone applauded?"
Alicia rolled her eyes. "Eric, I'm the one who thought it was pretty cool all along! Remember? I told you that you'd feel better about it once it was over."
Chris returned to the couch and tossed Eric a CD.
Eric caught the CD clumsily in his lap. He picked it up and examined the front cover. "'Kronos Quartet: Black Angels'. Cool."
Chris refilled his glass. "Are you familiar with that CD?"
"Yeah, sure. I remember when it came out. I've heard some of the tracks on the radio."
"You don't own it, though, do you?"
"No."
Chris smiled and leaned back into the couch. "Well, now you do."
Eric raised an eyebrow. "Is this for me then?"
"It is. It's your CD in trade for 'Eight Songs for a Mad King'."
Eric looked blankly at Chris for a long moment before his face lit up. "Oh my god I completely forgot about that. So you found somebody who wanted it? And this is what they offered in trade?"
"Yep."
Fred looked at Chris. "What's this about a mad king?" And Chris explained the circumstances of the CD Eric had given to Chris last month, while Eric skimmed through the liner notes.
Eric interrupted. "Oh hey! This the Kronos Quartet CD that has the Charles Ives recording on it! 'They Are There' by Charles Ives, performed by Charles Ives. It's this really early record. Charles Ives was having some of his songs performed for a recording — this was back before magnetic tape was invented, so you would go into the studio and perform and they recorded it directly. You were cutting the master disk live, right there in the studio. No dubbing or overlaying or anything, so if you screwed up, you had to start over from the beginning."
Alicia interrupted. "And so tell us, how old were you back then grampa?"
Eric gave her a look but otherwise ignored this comment. "So Ives was having some of his songs recorded, and one of them was sort of a send-up of the fighting songs from World War I. Sort of halfway between being a parody and a protest song. And the performer in the studio was doing it wrong. Too sincerely or something, I don't know the details, but what happened is that Ives got really angry and interrupted, and starting yelling at the performer, and shoved the person off the piano, saying 'I'll show you how you're supposed to sing this song!' And with the recording still going, he belted out this wild, half-crazed performance of his own song. And so they saved this recording of him, and it came to light after his death. It's the only recording ever made of him performing his own music. And it's not an accurate performance at all, but it's just wildly energetic."
"And so the Kronos Quartet included that recording on their CD?"
"Yes. I mean no, what they did was they composed an accompaniament for themselves to play along with the recording. So it's listed as 'They are There' by Charles Ives for singer, piano, and string quartet."
"Sounds cool," said Chris.
"Can we listen to just that one track? Do you mind?"
"No, not at all." Chris stood up and took the CD from Eric. "Presuming nobody else minds."
Fred piped up. "Does Charles Ives hit the piano keys with his forehead at any point?"
Eric looked at Fred. "You know, he doesn't do that, but I believe that he does play a couple of tone clusters with his fists."
Fred grinned. "Right on."
Chris got to work late the next day. His second glass of wine had left him sleeping deep and dreamless afterwards, and his alarm clock had failed to wake him up. Emma had finally come downstairs and pounded on his door to get him to turn it off. By the time he had worked through the pending email and bug reports, it was after two.
Chris got up and prepared to go to lunch. Then, on a whim he walked over to Dell's cubicle.
Dell was clattering away at the keyboard, headphones in place. Chris waved a hand in Dell's field of peripheral vision. Dell looked up, sat back, and pushed the headphones off of his ears. Chris could hear a jittery sound like a skipping CD emanating from them. "Hey Chris. How's it going?"
"It's going okay."
"How was the concert on Sunday?"
Chris nodded. "It was good. Eric's piece turned out to be pretty dramatic, actually."
Dell nodded. "That's cool. Maybe I'll catch him next time."
"Yeah, maybe next time." Chris grinned to himself. "What are you listening to? Not Miss Murgratroid, I'm guessing."
"No, I'm listening to some John Oswald stuff here. I'm actually kind of in middle of something right now, so I only got a minute or so to talk."
"Oh. No problem. I just wanted to stop by and tell you that I gave Eric your CD, and he says thanks."
"Oh, okay. Was he happy with it then?"
"Yeah, I think so. He played a few of the tracks from it last night for all of us to hear. And I think he was looking forward to hearing the Shostakovich piece."
"Right on. I'm glad that he's enjoying it. I couldn't stand it myself. I'm more than happy to be rid of it. As far as I'm concerned, I totally came out ahead in this deal." Dell turned back to his computer. "And no doubt he feels exactly the same way." Dell placed his headphones back over his ears and returned to work.
Chris smiled, said, "Later Dell," and left to go eat lunch.